


Hunger of the Pine

by alby_mangroves, Nonymos



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A Dark And Magical Forest, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, An Evil Nobleman, An Impossible Quest, Art, Child Abuse, F/M, Illustrated, Past Child Abuse, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Russian Mythology, Slavic Folklore, What Is Natasha?, You Might Just Find Out, hunter bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25821985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alby_mangroves/pseuds/alby_mangroves, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonymos/pseuds/Nonymos
Summary: Life at home is cruel and the winters are harsh, but with Steve's friendship, Bucky feels like he can survive anything the world throws his way. So when Steve himself is in danger, Bucky must embark on a dangerous quest that may end up in a curse... or a blessing.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 552
Kudos: 360





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Nonymos: Hey there, readers! It is my greatest pleasure to post another collab with the one, the only, the amazing Alby Mangroves! Just wait until you see those arts, just WAIT. Be prepared to stare at your screen for _hours._  
>  I must also thank her for, once again, furnishing me with a fantastic prompt that allowed me to joyfully explore yet uncharted writing lands. :D  
> We'll stick to my usual weekly posting schedule - a chapter every Monday - and be advised that there will be one piece of gorgeous, gorgeous art at the end of _each_ of these chapters!
> 
> alby: Thank you to Nony for being a wonderful friend and such a generous and intrepid fandom creator ♥ I hope you all enjoy our labour of love!  
> 

# 1.

“Bucky!” A whisper. “Look what I found! _Bucky!”_

Bucky groaned and turned over, bringing his thin rugged pillow over his head. Nobody but Steve still called him by his old childhood nickname. Yes, he’d _had_ buck teeth, but he’d grown out of them—a boy of sixteen now, nearly seventeen, silent and sullen and broad enough in the shoulders he was nearly a man…

_“Bucky!”_

Hell, he did think of himself as Bucky, so in the end Steve won; he always did, even when the argument never left the confines of Bucky’s head. Steve was going to win this time, too, shaking his shoulder to pull him out of sleep, as if his hurried whispers weren’t enough.

Sighing, Bucky pushed the pillow away from his face. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he murmured. “It’s too close to dawn.”

It was pointless to warn Steve off, he knew, but he still tried every time. He sat up on the floor, pushing his straw pillow away from the hearth. The house was still dark; it wasn’t morning yet. His Da’s door wasn’t open. He could have slept for another hour before he had to go feed the goats. But Steve was there by his bed, his thin face and bright eyes face all aglow with the slumbering coals, and—

No. The glow came from something in his hands _._ When Bucky’s awareness finally kicked in, his first instinctive motion was to snatch the thing away from him so he wouldn’t burn himself, but as soon as he held it in his hand, surprise made him go still.

It was a long, thick, elegantly curled feather, like a lick of flame, red, orange and yellow, gently smoldering in the dark. Its very base, near the stem, had blue and purple hues. Steve crawled onto the bedding next to him and just stared in open wonder as Bucky’s fingers slowly brushed up the soft vane.

“It’s warm,” Bucky murmured. He turned it over a few times. “Where did you find this?”

“Under the birch tree. It was just lying there.”

It was very clearly magic, and Bucky had never heard about anything good come out of magic; yet how could he mistrust it just now, when it felt so gentle, so benevolent? It cast golden shadows around the room when he spun it in his hands. For a fleeting moment, the beaten-earth floor and walls looked like a tsar’s bedchamber.

“You should put it back,” he mumbled, passing it to him.

Steve shook his head without a word, looking down at the wonder in his lap. It was a primary feather, longer than his skinny forearm. Bucky found himself wondering what kind of bird might have shed such an extraordinary thing; and now that he wasn’t holding it anymore, the shiver of dread at the thought of magic came back, stronger this time.

“You should put it back,” he said again. “Or throw it away. Bury it.”

Steve jumped. “Bury it? I couldn’t.”

“I’ll help you,” Bucky said, only too aware Steve’s crooked spine and spindly limbs wouldn’t let him handle a shovel, not on stone-hard frozen ground. “I’ll find time.”

“I meant I _won’t,”_ Steve snapped. At fourteen, he was already prouder than a cat. “It _came_ to me. I’ll put it in a pot by my mom’s bedside.”

Bucky opened his mouth to say it might not be good for her health; but then he closed it without saying anything. Not much could be done to worsen Sarah’s health at this point. Her pained coughing now overcame her even while she slept, driving Steve out of the house at the earliest hour to wander around in the icy morning fog, aching and shivery and miserable. He’d ended up at Bucky’s house more than a few times lately, despite the risk.

“She’d like that,” Bucky conceded quietly. “It looks nice.” He felt another wave of warmth from the feather. “It _feels_ nice.”

A faraway bleat sent tiredness tumbling down his spine. No time to go back to sleep now; the chores of the day awaited. But the proximity of the feather forbade exhaustion from overcoming him completely. He was caught in its incandescence, still saw it wherever he looked, printed on the inside of his eyes.

“You should go home,” he said, trying to pull himself out of his fascination. “You know my Da can’t find you here.”

“I wouldn’t let him,” Steve said at once. Then, like an apology: “And I wanted to show you. I won’t show it to anyone else. I wanted to show _you.”_

“I know.” Bucky couldn’t keep the fondness out of his voice. He wasn't allowed to make friends, but that had never stopped Steve. If anything, he was growing more daring over time, more likely to offer Bucky little tokens of love every chance he got. Maybe because he enjoyed breaking rules; or maybe he did like Bucky that much. In any case, Bucky was glad, deeply glad, a warmth in his chest like the feather’s warmth. Perhaps it was indeed a gift.

They shared a little smile, and for a few seconds everything was good. Then the goat bleated again outside. Bucky murmured, “I have to…” and Steve replied, “Yeah,” and slipped out of the room.

The strange red-gold glow went with him, leaving behind only the colder, realer light of dawn creeping across the wall.

It would only be a few days later when Bucky would hear his father mention that Sarah Róg’s health had miraculously improved. She would speak to all that would listen of a benevolent warmth coursing down her body, relieving her cold chest and aching joints. And he’d know, and he’d feel warm again, too. A lot of people called Bucky sullen, but they didn’t know he was just good at being silent; and they couldn’t see when he was smiling inside.

*

Over the next few years, Sarah’s health kept improving magnificently, until she was the brightest, happiest widow you’d ever seen west of the Elbe. Bucky grew ever broader and stronger and more silent, and Steve ever weedier, ever louder, and ever more prone to defy unjust authority. He never lashed out at Bucky’s Da anymore, not after the one time he truly had, when they were small— _it’s not his fault his Ma died having him!—_ and Bucky was beaten by his Da so bad he couldn’t walk for a week.

But Steve kept breaking rules for Bucky and nursing anger for Bucky and making Bucky’s life a little better in a thousand tiny ways, when he had so few shares of happiness himself.

Although he had only ever seen it once, Bucky found himself thinking of the feather every once in a while, wishing he could see it again. It had turned out to be a great blessing after all, and he couldn’t have imagined people more fitting than the Rógs to receive it. In his mind he associated it with them. He wished he could have felt it under his fingers again, if only just once. But the Rógs’ house was so inaccessible to him it might as well be in the Faraway Forest. His father watched his every move. If Bucky was seen talking to people outside of the marketplace, he was beaten; if he deviated from his route coming back to the house, he was beaten; if he wasn’t otherwise constantly dealing with chores and farm work, he was beaten. These days his Da didn’t hit him quite so much, because Bucky had learned how to behave.

It was enough, he mused, to know that the feather was there somewhere in town, lending its magic to the ones who needed it most.

The winters were growing harsher every year, and sturdier people than Steve fell ill and died in neighboring villages. But nobody succumbed to the cold in a five-mile radius around the Rógs’ house; once or twice, Bucky saw Sarah doing the rounds, going from door to door, asking everyone if they needed care, if they didn’t feel sick. She had on her arm a wicker basket with a checkered cloth carefully tucked over its contents—which seemed to glow. Bucky felt that glow in his chest all the way home, knowing what she was doing, carrying a bit of her magic door to door, when anyone else would have never even thought of sharing it.

Of course, the first time she came to the Stodołnys’ house, Bucky’s father snorted at her and sent her on her way; he didn’t like widows. She tried two more times the following weeks, then gave up for good, probably after Steve told her that angering Jerzy Stodołny could only have bad consequences for Bucky. The consequences came anyway: Bucky caught the flu soon afterwards—he was the only one in the village to get it that winter, which didn’t stop his Da from sending him out in the snow the next day, shivering with fever.

Illness was nothing to him, he thought, trying to focus as he worked in the cold. He was strong; he didn’t need magic. Other people needed magic more than him. He kept telling himself that the whole day, as he swept the floors and milked the goats and fed the chickens, feeling ice cold and burning hot at the same time. But as he came back from the marketplace, wishing his coat were thicker, he felt a tight grip on his arm.

“Steve? What—”

Steve dragged him into the street with a determined look on his face; Bucky was so dizzy and stuffy he just let him. For a few minutes he didn’t understand at all what was happening or where they were going, but then they were in front of Steve’s house, and then they were going past the threshold.

As soon as Bucky stepped inside, he _felt_ the magical warmth spread down his body just like Sarah always said. Despite himself, he relaxed, throwing back his head and breathing deeply through his newly decongested nose.

Steve wanted to pull him further in, but Bucky was suddenly afraid to see it again, afraid to want it too much. If he never saw it, he could pretend it didn’t exist, and he could stop himself from _wanting._

“I can’t,” he mumbled, softly disentangling himself from Steve’s grip. “I can’t, Steve, I have chores.”

Steve’s lips went tight and thin, and Bucky knew exactly what he was thinking, because he’d said it often enough—if only he were stronger, he would make Bucky’s Da leave him alone for good. He often asked Bucky why he bore it. _You could walk out!_ he said, _You could come live with us!_

And if it had been just Steve, Bucky might have done it, too. Nobody would have found it strange, for him to move in to little Stefan Róg’s house after the death of his mother. Everybody would have been glad he’d taken it upon himself to help. He could have split his time between his house and Steve’s; twice the work, but half the misery. His Da couldn’t have opposed it, not without losing face in front of the whole town.

But Sarah had lived. And Bucky could never resent fate for that. So he stayed with his Da, because he had nowhere else to go, and a lot of work to do. His big sister had been married off a long time ago, and no woman would want him, maybe because he was too quiet, too reserved. Some said _scary_ , now that he’d grown. Steve wasn’t scared of him. But Steve wasn’t scared of anything. Bucky thought mostly the girls didn’t want Jerzy Stodołny for a father-in-law, and he couldn’t blame them. He snuck glances at them sometimes in the market, at the ribbons in their hair and the curve of their waist, but then he looked away. Everything was easier when you looked away.

It wasn’t so bad, most of the time. He had long stretches of quiet when he went into the woods to hunt. And he had a friend, which was as precious to him as the glowing feather was to the village, though they didn’t even know it was there. Bucky had a friend and _knew_ it: how lucky was he? It was all right if he hadn’t let himself see the feather again. He had felt its warmth thanks to Steve, and that was almost as good.

“Here,” Steve told him that day, right before he left. “My Ma made those for you.”

It was two handkerchiefs, pure white, with beautiful blue embroidery all around them, and his name in the middle, in clumsy black thread. Steve had sewn in _Bucky_ instead of _Jakub,_ which made Bucky smile despite everything.

On his way home, he found he didn’t need to blow his nose. A few minutes basking in the feather’s glow had cured him.

*

Every year when spring came, the duke’s men came with it, riding their massive horses down the street without care. Shod hooves plodded the earth, turned it over, mixed sleet in, made it all mud. The men didn’t notice; they had high, expensive leather boots that would have allowed them to wade through a river and come out dry-footed.

They banged on every door to collect the annual tax, counting every silver kopa pressed reluctantly into their hand. Bucky caught a glimpse of them and decided to go hunting that day and the days afterwards, to avoid his Da’s anger. Paying his taxes always drove Jerzy Stodołny into a foul mood. The rest of the village was angry too, nervous, on edge like a goat harassed by flies. Bucky would rather get out if he could, and for once, this was a choice he could make, because the pantry was empty.

He stayed in the woods for three days, tracking a deer, enjoying the quiet and the solitude, and the kinder weather that let him sleep outside the house for a while. He had the knack when it came to curling between tree roots now. Streams were starting to burble to life, digging bluish paths in the snow. Birds were vocalizing; a green haze was draping the trees, ready to flash into vivid color. Everything was still white all around, but the woods were preparing to shake off their snow fur, stretch their limbs, let sap and honey come glint in the sun. It was all so close Bucky could taste it.

He came back with the deer over his shoulders, and with a small hare that he’d stuffed down his pack to give Steve on his way home. Getting to the Rógs’ door, he knocked—he planned to just give it and go, like he always did, but his knock didn’t stir anyone inside. He knocked again to be sure he’d been heard. When nothing moved once again, he thought maybe they were at the market and went to knock on the neighbor’s door.

“Stefan?” he asked, in his quiet, hoarse voice. “Stefan Róg?”

Gosia, the eldest Wozak daughter, was a good neighbor to Steve. She was also one of the only people in the village who didn’t harbor a faint air of contempt for Bucky, despite her beautiful brown curls and vivid dark eyes which would have allowed her to look down on anyone. It was when he saw how pale she looked that the sinking feeling started in his stomach.

“But Jakub,” she said, seeing him. “Jakub, Stefan’s _gone.”_

“Gone?” Bucky repeated stupidly.

“You don’t you know what happened? Oh,” she said when she noticed the deer over his shoulders, the hare he had in hand, “of course you don’t.”

What had happened was this: the duke’s soldiers had come into town to collect money just as planned, and had expressed surprise at the repeated lack of winter deaths for the past four years. Upon hearing repeatedly that Sarah Róg, the doctor’s widow, had started keeping a close watch on them all during the cold season, they had entered her house instead of just waiting for payment at the door, and found—

“I don’t know what it was,” said Gosia. “Stefan wouldn’t say. He just repeated they’d stolen something from her.”

The next day, Sarah had started coughing. The day after that, she had fallen ill.

The day after that, she had died.

“Where’s Stefan?” Bucky said in a wan voice. “ _Where’s Stefan?_ ”

“He was mad with grief. He went to the duke’s house,” said Gosia. “To demand justice.”

Bucky threw the deer off his shoulders and bolted down the road.

*

He was a man now, of nearly twenty, hardened with long days and nights of hunting, hardened by constant chores and his Da’s belt over his back. He could run with long, continuous strides, his chest like bellows, blowing plumes of steam ahead of him, out in the cool spring night. Everything was melting, cracking, coming down around his ears, slabs of snow falling apiece from the pine trees, everything falling apart. He could bear everything but this. He had nothing, but he had Steve; if he didn’t even have Steve then he didn’t know how to go on living, day after grueling day.

Night had fallen by the time he got to the ducal house; it was an impressive manor of a thing, carved beams curling up above the entrance, gilded with gold leaf. A red star shone in the middle, flanked with two swords; a coat of arms.

The guards at the entrance let him through when he said where he was from and why he’d come. But they laughed as he went in, and the sound of their laughter pursued him all the way across the beaten-earth courtyard.

Even by moonlight, the place was bustling with activity, carts and horses and men moving around in a complex ballet. Bucky had never seen so many people together except on market days, and it would have shortened his breath if it hadn’t been so short already. He asked his way to everyone he met, in his cracking, unused voice, until eventually he’d made himself enough of a fool that he was ushered to the scullery and told to wait.

It was three hours before he was granted audience.

“His Grace Aleksander, Duke Pierce!”

The duke wasn’t fat, which surprised Bucky for a moment; he had never seen him before—indeed never seen anyone one might consider wealthy. He had expected someone well-fed, but instead Duke Pierce looked _hungry._ He had silver hair with still traces of gold in it, and clear eyes so sharp they seemed to be the sole reason for his nickname, skewering Bucky right through.

“My lord,” Bucky began awkwardly, and then, with a pang of icy fear because he’d said something wrong already, “I mean—your Grace.”

Four fires at once— _four!—_ were roaring in the room, even though the thick stone walls alone would have been enough to keep away the chill. A pair of guards were stationed by the doors. The duke was sitting on a beautifully carved chair, high on a little platform, obviously so he could look down on anybody who came to beseech him.

“I’ve come about my f…” He had never dared call Steve a friend out loud. He took a deep breath. “My name is Jakub Stodołny. I’ve come for my friend Stefan. Stefan Róg.”

The words dried in his throat. Pierce had tugged out a feather from his shirt and was now pulling it though his fingers, again and again, an easy, self-satisfied gesture, like a cat at play. It was glowing like a live coal.

Bucky had dreamed of seeing this feather again—in his mind it was now one and the same with the Rógs’ home, a home which would have liked nothing better than to become his, if he had only found the strength to defy his father. Now he _had_ defied him—there was no one home to help with the goats, with the chores, he hadn’t even brought back the deer. When he got home his father might beat him to death. But it wouldn’t matter, because Sarah was dead, Steve maybe dead too, and the feather was in the hands of that man who was _playing with it_.

“Stefan Róg,” Bucky pleaded again. He knew his voice said: _he’s all I have._

“Don’t worry. He’s in the dungeon,” Pierce answered as if distractedly, still preening his sole feather. “Wonderful thing, this. Don’t you agree?”

Bucky had never been good with words and the sparring thereof. But he knew a peasant like him hadn’t been granted an audience for nothing. “Please tell me what you want.”

“What I _want?”_ Pierce arched an absurdly slim eyebrow, as if offended to see him go straight to the point. “Your friend was the one who wanted a great deal of things. Justice and reparation and who knows what else. Nearly talked my ear off. He never even tried to deny this little thing was his, though. Hell, that’s what he came _for_.” The feather was like a living flame in his hands. He looked at it for a while, then added casually: “The practice of magic is a very serious accusation, you know. One could be burned at the stake for it.”

Bucky felt like his stomach was going to come out of his mouth.

“He’s not a witch, please, he—he just found the feather in the woods one day. Please—your Grace,” he remembered again to add, much too late.

“Found it in the woods? Indeed.” Pierce sounded disappointed, but not surprised. He waved the feather at him. “I hear you’re an excellent hunter. Do you know what this is?”

“I don’t, your Grace,” Bucky said, desperate. “Please—”

“No, of course you don’t. You’re a farmer, aren’t you? _Stodołny_. Even your name came out of a barn.” Pierce ran the feather through his fingers again. “It’s a firebird feather. Alone, it’s a good luck charm. But the _creature_ itself… Why, it could grant power beyond anything you can imagine.” He studied it in the candelabra’s light. “Enough to overthrow the tsar.”

“Your Grace?”

“It’s a good luck charm,” Pierce repeated affably, as if realizing Bucky was too stupid to understand the rest of what he was saying. “Naturally, the creature doesn’t like its freedom restrained. Whoever catches it is sure to be cursed for the rest of his indubitably short life. Isn’t that a conundrum? Or maybe you don’t know that word.”

Bucky felt his cheeks burn. He said nothing. Steve would have been yelling up a storm already; but Bucky was good at keeping quiet when he wanted to scream.

“Of course, the dilemma is easily solved: have the hunter and the owner be two different people. So here we are, Jakub Stodołny: your little friend has so gravely insulted me, I am afraid I cannot let him out of the dungeons alive.” A fox’s smile. “Unless, of course, someone were to gift me a present so _extravagant_ I would have no choice but to grant him anything he wanted in exchange.”

The weight of hopelessness, of being left with no choice, was very familiar to Bucky. Resignation was so common to him he didn’t notice it anymore, too. Hope, though—desperate hope tasted sharp in his mouth. “You will keep him alive? You will keep him alive until I come back?”

“I will not precipitate his end,” Pierce corrected in a sweetened voice. “But you know better than me how harsh winters can get, my dear boy. So I would set off at once if I were you.”

“Set off to _where?”_

“Where do you think? Even someone like you must know where magic lives. I think the firebird dropped this feather on its way home, Jakub Stodołny. I think it was going back…”

“…to the Faraway Forest,” Bucky breathed. “It’s—they say it’s on the other side of the Volga…”

“Like I said.” Pierce smiled again, without it reaching his eyes at all. “Better set off at once.”

*

Pierce had a dark sense of humor—dark enough to promote Bucky to Ducal Hunter and give him his very own escort. Of course, those men were there to make sure he didn’t just run off as soon as he was out of sight of the Duke’s house. Their mission was to bring him at the edge of the forest, to wait for him to come back out with his prize, and, in case of failure, to return home with his head. Upon which Steve would be dragged out of his dungeon to be burned alive.

Bucky had no intention of running off.

He slept in the scullery, on the floor. He was used to the floor. In the morning, he washed with handfuls of snow, tied his dark hair back into a short braid and put on the clothing Pierce had had laid out for him—black suede and wool with a star’s outline on the left shoulder, embroidered in red. Bucky’s homemade bow and arrow had been replaced with an impressive crossbow of mulberry wood and horn, along with two dozen iron bolts in narrow leather quivers strung on a sideways belt. He even had new boots, just like the soldiers’, instead of his old straw-filled shoes falling to pieces. All of this felt uncomfortably like an investment, one he knew he must repay sooner or later.

He wasn’t sure whether he could capture a firebird. He was a good hunter, but he usually tried to kill his prey outright: why make anything suffer? And a mythical bird would probably prove smarter than a panicked hare. All the same, he had no choice but to try.

Slinging the crossbow over his back, he came out of the changing rooms face-to-face with Brókk—an unpleasant, wolf-like man who was the leader of his hunting guard. They both knew Bucky was his prisoner in everything but name. But they were the same height and Bucky might even be a little broader than him, so he made his face flat as people often blamed him for doing, and said, “I want to see him before I leave.”

“See him, fine,” Brókk said with a nasty smile.

He led Bucky down to the dungeons and presented him with a massive oak door, barred with black iron. Pushing open a slot in the bottom half of the panel, he allowed Bucky to crouch and peer inside. What he saw squeezed his heart so much he let out a faint gasp: Steve was there, alive but looking smaller than he’d ever looked, curled up on the bare stone floor, chained to the wall with manacles that looked ridiculously big on him.

“Steve,” Bucky called in an urgent whisper. _“Steve.”_

For a while it seemed like Steve might be asleep, or dead. But then he slowly raised his head—probably alerted by his nickname, just like Bucky was when Steve was the one calling him. When he saw Bucky, his eyes went round.

“Buck—” He crawled forward then scowled when the chains tensed; one of them was linked to a heavy collar around his neck. It was humiliating restraints, meant for a witch indeed, or a dog, and Bucky felt his resolve grow with his fear and his rage and his sorrow.

“I’m going to get you out of here.” He pushed his fingers through the slot; it was useless, because he couldn’t reach inside and Steve couldn’t crawl to the door anyway. _See_ him, but not touch him. “I promise. Whatever it takes.”

“Bucky, what do you mean? _Bucky,”_ Steve called urgently—but Bucky was already up, turning away from Brókk’s mocking gaze, heading back up the stairs, taking them two at a time. His heart was pounding loud in his chest, louder in his ears. In the corner of his eyes he could see the stake in the middle of the courtyard, the one where they would tie up his friend if he failed to come back.

*

Bucky had never traveled so far away from home. Yet he was still in the world he knew, forest and mud and sleet, and streams swelling with snowmelt, cascading happily from rock to mossy rock. When he hunted, all the world was the same to him, one long stretch of wilderness where he had always found peace and quiet, which to him was almost a synonym of happiness.

They didn’t have horses—Pierce’s investment hadn’t reached this far—so they had to walk by the side of the road where it wasn’t too muddy, Bucky and Brókk and the three other men of his escort, whose name he didn’t even know. They had made no effort to talk to him; they seemed to regard him as a pig led to the slaughter. Bucky hadn’t thought much about his own potential demise, not really. He knew he was going to be cursed if he succeeded in his task, but Steve’s death would have been much worse. He did have a choice, after all; and he’d already made it.

The first weeks of travel quickly turned into monotony, sleeping as they could, walking during the day, hunting hares and birds for food. They often met carts on the road—sometimes they paid them a few copper coins to be carried for a stretch, and rest their aching feet. Some of them carried fat girls with blond braids and rosy cheeks, which prompted Brókk and his men to whistle and jeer and call out comments to make them blush even more.

Bucky eyed them warily; they didn’t seem too offended by the attention, and even seemed to enjoy it for some. Still, he felt his best course of action was to stay silent, in case they _were_ secretly taking offense. He didn’t want any trouble, nothing that could slow down the journey. The girls’ eyes sometimes trailed after him, along with almost perplexed expressions, like they’d never seen anything like him before. At first, he thought maybe they found him odd or impolite; but the fifth time they met a cart full of pretty girls on the road, after they had laughed at the jeers of Bucky’s escort and stared after him again, one of Brókk’s men made a noise of disgust. “Oh, what’s the use? They’ve all only got eyes for the brooding pretty boy.”

It took Bucky another half-day of walking to wonder if that meant _him._ Women had always been to him more unreachable than firebirds and magic forests. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to approach them; indeed, he felt he could have been good enough at it, if he’d had the chance. He had never been particularly tongue-tied in front of Gosia, for instance. But his father had beaten the curiosity out of him very soon, and they had quickly lost interest in him since he couldn’t play. Marriage might as well be a word in another language altogether; he would never have the money for a bride’s dowry.

He had now, almost accidentally, got away from his father’s house. Broken free—though he felt, and was, the further thing away from _free_. Steve haunted him every second of every day. But supposing he came back from his quest alive, supposing he found employment somewhere, he still couldn’t offer himself—a cursed man, whatever form the curse may take—as a husband to anyone. He couldn’t stay with Steve either, lest he cursed him too. None of it mattered. His own self, his prospects, his future; all of that was of no concern anymore. Never had been, really, so it wasn’t a great loss.

*

The journey took them two months. In the fifth week, Brókk insisted on buying a great gleaming cage for the bird—it was a dog’s crate, really, made of wood and iron wire. Then he bought silver thread for a fantastic price and spun it all around the cage’s bars, saying silver neutralized magic. After he was done, the thing weighed so much they had to drag it behind them in turns.

All the time, Bucky kept thinking about Steve locked in his dungeon with iron around his throat, away from the sun and from his village, with his mother dead, his friend gone. At least, at _least_ it was warm; spring was blooming fast into summer, and if Bucky managed to be quick—if he caught the bird right away, if they turned around at once—they could come back before winter sank its claws into the dukedom again, and Steve would be all right.

Bucky sometimes wondered whether his Da knew where he’d gone, and why. Did he miss him? Did he curse his name? The second option felt more likely. It was surprising, really, how easily Bucky had stepped out of his miserable life. It made him feel like worthless scum for not doing it earlier, for not seeing how easy it was. But even that shame was removed from him; he felt like he was another person altogether, especially with the new clothing the Duke had given him, like a costume.

Strangely, despite the tiring journey, he also felt stronger and more alert; not getting beat up in weeks probably helped. Aches were vanishing, stiff muscles were loosening. He felt himself bloom into the full potential of his body, as if everything in him was getting ready for the trial to come. Even his beard grew thicker and darker, so that he had to shave every morning now.

His escort still treated him with distant coldness at best; at night, he slept a little way away from them, and he didn’t walk by their side on the road. But they didn’t impede each other either, and worked frighteningly well together when they hunted—of course perfect cooperation was mandatory for everyone to have their bellies full, so in the end they were sort of a team, and even a good team, though there was no lost love between them. Bucky had to remind himself every day they wouldn’t hesitate to slit his throat if he came to fail his mission.

And then one day, a day like any other, they climbed a hill that looked like all other hills before it and found themselves overlooking the Forest.

*

“There it is,” Brókk said, putting down the cage with a groan. “On the other side of the river.”

Bucky didn’t ask how he knew. Over the past few days, the country had grown thicker and wilder around them; they hadn’t come across a town in a long while, just a few clutter of houses huddling together against cold or magic or both. It was a beautiful day, completely cloudless, with the sun shining high above; and yet the Forest on the other side of the river was a perfectly black line, drawn unbroken all across the horizon, as far as the eye could see on both sides.

It was like someone had ripped a strip off the world, to reveal only shadow behind.

They crossed the river without too much trouble, finding their footing on flat, sun-warmed stones, carrying the cage between them. But as soon as they had come upon the bank, Bucky knew this place was not for men. It took him a moment to understand why; the silence felt natural at first, punctuated with bird calls and chirping crickets. But then he gradually realized they couldn’t hear the rumbling of the river anymore.

They all turned to look at it. It was right there, foaming and tumultuous as ever, but it could have been a glass sculpture for all the noise it made.

“That’s our cue for sure,” Brókk said, shouldering off his pack and tugging it open. “Hang on.”

He dug around into his things for a while, pulling out this and that, and finally drew out a long thing wrapped in black silk. He unwrapped the cloth and held its contents out to Bucky, who stared.

It was the firebird feather.

That was why he’d gotten so much better, so much stronger over the journey. The Rógs had been with him all along. It tightened his throat and made his eyes prickle with tears, but he was practiced at hiding them, and let nothing show. He just reached out and took the feather and held it in his hands for the first time since Steve had found it under the trees. It was just as long and rich as he remembered, still alive and glowing like a flame, even from up close. He had hoped so badly for a chance to hold it again; they did say to be careful what you wished for.

“Duke Pierce thought you might need it,” Brókk commented. “If only to light your way. Don’t you lose it, Stodołny, especially if you don’t bring anything back.”

“I’ll fulfill my end of the bargain,” Bucky said quietly.

Brókk laughed, maybe at the idea that the Duke could strike anything like a bargain with a farmer whose friend he held in his dungeon. Then he said, “Off you go, then.”

Bucky only looked at him.

“There was never any talk of us following you into the Forest, Stodołny. We’ve come here, but,” Brókk gestured at the silent river, “no further. None of _us_ signed up for a curse.”

There was a wicked look on his face like he wanted Bucky to protest and beg not to go alone. Bucky thought of Sarah dead, of Steve imprisoned. He put the feather into his pack and slung it over his shoulder, feeling its weight over the scars his father’s belt had left him.

“I’m already cursed,” he said, and walked forward into the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading - we love comments on both the story and the art, don't hesitate to share your thoughts!
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> [Art on Tumblr](https://artgroves.tumblr.com/tagged/Hunger-of-the-Pine)


	2. Chapter 2

# 2.

Walking into the Forest was like walking into the ocean.

At first, it felt like something he could handle. Sure, the trees were unusually tall, and thick, and dark—only a shade away from black—and fading into obscurity when he looked ahead; but the sun still streamed through, down to a forest floor that was cleared of almost all underbrush, covered only with pine needles. When he looked over his shoulder, he could see the men, who didn’t look back at him, busying themselves with setting up camp.

Then, as he walked, the straight, narrow trunks grew closer together; the featureless ground beneath his feet just meant there wasn’t anything like a path he could follow. He could feel gnarled roots under the pine needles layer, now; at times he even saw them, strangely polished with age, like gleaming wooden serpents coiled up in the shadows. The ground sloped down almost imperceptibly, carrying him deeper into the woods, and when he looked behind him again, there were only trees.

He frowned a little, but kept going. Going further into the woods felt like a good idea. If he stayed on the edges, he would never find what he had come for. It was a warm day. The pine needles were very soft under his feet, distilling a heady perfume into the spring air. He felt strong, and capable.

Still, considering the trees, he thought he needed to find, first, a place to come back to. Maybe a fallen tree, or a big mossy rock, or a stream. Yes, he needed a stream. He needed to establish a camp for himself. Water, food. He had food—did he? When he stopped to look into his pack, he found a few rolls of smoked meat, which seemed fresh enough. Enough for a few days, probably. It looked like hare.

Reassured, he closed his pack and stared walking again, though his steps were less decisive than before. Had he been going any direction in particular? Need to find a likely place, yes. To look around. But everything around him looked the same now.

A flock of birds flew over his head, startling him; the forest was so very quiet otherwise. The pine needles smothered his footsteps completely, except when his boots scraped over one of those roots peeking out of the soil, like a sea monster’s spine breaching ocean waters. Everything was darker, though the sun still shone; but it was as if it shone from much further up, a weak, distant light. Looking up to try and spot it, he realized the trees now seemed impossibly tall; he could hardly even see their branches, only endless trunks and a fuzzy black canopy of pine needles overhead.

But tall was good. He wanted tall trees. Right? Yes. Tall trees because—birds. Yes, birds, he’d just seen a flock of birds. And birds lived in tall trees.

His steps, which had been slowing down for a while, quietly came to a halt. He mouthed to himself, _Birds live in tall trees._ Why was he so focused on a thought so inane?

Well, it was about the birds. Or about the trees. No—the birds, he was pretty sure. Or maybe a single bird. Whatever it was about, he needed—he needed _it,_ to bring back to his friend. His friend whose name he couldn’t recall just now.

It was only then that panic truly started clawing its way down his throat. His friend’s name. He stared furiously into space, trying to stir up the fading coals of his brain. Birds. Trees. A _friend._ A reason to be here. He should have known the name of his friend. He knew it better than his own name. His own name, which was—

Which was—

He suddenly looked up, expecting something to jump out at him. It felt like it must happen now, now that the trap had closed upon him: the forest had grown so dark and tight. Why had he come here? _How_ had he come here? It was like he had always been wandering those woods. They had robbed him of everything, wiped him completely. Now all they had left to do was to swallow him whole.

He threw down his pack and tugged it open, clumsy with panic. There had to be something in there to remind him of who he was and why he’d come here. Tears were beginning to well up in his eyes, like a child; he pushed them back with an effort. He took out the smoked meat again, unstrapped the massive crossbow from the side of his pack, took out leather laces, bird seed, a few carved whistles. He dug down, took out everything until it was all empty, upended it and shook it over the ground, but nothing more fell out. It was as though he had sprung from the earth like this, a hunter fully formed, put on this earth only to track and kill.

He pulled at his clothing, looked himself over. The red star on his left shoulder rang no bells. More tears blurred his vision, rolled down this time; his breathing hitched. The sound felt so pathetic to him, in the immense silence of the woods, that he was overcome by the need to _get a hold of himself._ He swallowed, forced the tears back once more, took out his handkerchief to wipe the tracks down his face.

And he stayed frozen, looking at the single word carefully embroidered with a clumsy, but determined hand.

_Bucky._

“Oh,” he gasped, like gems had trickled out of it.

He held the kerchief to his face, closed his eyes hard, took a deep breath. When he reopened them, a glint caught his eye. He had thrown a strip of black cloth away, mistaking it for a sock or a belt. But now that he looked closer, he saw that it was silk, and when he pulled it open there was a feather inside that looked as though it was made of fire.

He stared at it, mesmerized, for a minute. Then he looked up at the trees. Now that he paid attention to them again, it really felt like they’d crowded close to watch him break down. He sniffed, then wiped his nose with his forearm, took a deep breath, and finally calmed down.

“I’m a hunter,” he told the Forest. “I’ve come for the firebird.”

The Forest answered nothing.

In the dark distance, far behind the trees, Bucky saw the shadow of a deer move soundlessly over the pine needles. Welcoming both the distraction and the opportunity for more food, he straightened up, sniffing again as he picked up his crossbow from the forest floor.

Before hefting it up, he blinked a few times as his brain tried to fix the perspective according to the trees lining the distance. Either the deer was closer than he thought—but it couldn’t be that close, not with as many trees between them—or it really was that far, but then it was—it was—

It was _huge._ Its antlers brushed the first branches, a hundred feet off the ground.

Bucky swallowed, and the sound was so loud in the complete silence that the deer turned its head towards him, far as it was. As it did so, its antlers caught across one of the dark trunks with a horrid scraping sound that echoed in the distance, leaving deep, shockingly white gouges across the bark. It fixed Bucky with an amber stare for a moment. Then it walked away and faded again into darkness.

Bucky exhaled. His crossbow, which had once looked to him so sleek and impressive, felt like a child’s toy in his hands now. The fact that his eyes were still swollen and hot didn’t help.

He did not try telling the Forest who he was again. But now he knew. More or less, anyway. With an intense effort, he put his thoughts back on track. First of all, he needed—a stream. Yes: water. Before he found anything else, he had to find water.

Giant deer probably needed lots of it. And the white gouges into the pine trees, glowing like a beacon in the dark, were the first decent marker he’d found. So he packed up all his things, put them over his shoulder and started walking again towards the wounded trees.

 _Bucky_ , he thought to himself. He could feel the name trying to slip from his grasp even now. _Bucky, Bucky_. _Bit of a weird name._

*

As he traveled, strange things happened.

For one, a silver city appeared above his head, built high in the branches. That would have been pretty odd all on its own, but the _truly_ strange thing was that he barely noticed. And once he finally did, it didn’t really surprise him. It was like seeing moss on trees.

He _knew_ it should have astonished him, but by the time he remembered this wasn’t a usual sight, the chance for awe had come and gone. It would have been a bit ridiculous to fall to his knees and gape upwards now, after he’d been staring distractedly at the suspended buildings for almost fifteen minutes. If this was an illusion—and it had to be—then it was poorly made. He supposed it made sense that the Forest would try to distract him from finding the firebird; just like his name, he could feel the memory trying to wiggle away at every moment.

The antlers’ gouges had not vanished from his sight, but they had not come any closer either. The city kept multiplying itself in the trees above, though, domed buildings, clinging to the branches like so many mistletoe balls, shining silver, lit up from the inside. The more he walked, the further it spread, until it was hung overhead as far as he could see in all directions. When he came across a tree that had an outright flight of stairs wrapped around the trunk, he scowled.

“I’m not going to fall for that,” he said.

The entire city winked out of existence, leaving him in the dark.

He hadn’t realized it had been lighting his steps. Now there was only solid obscurity left all around him. The night had fallen while he wasn’t looking. Everything was utterly quiet and still.

He could see black shapes on a slightly less black background. In the distance, the gouges across the trunks were still there, sort of glowing—maybe with moonlight?—plainly visible but still so _far._

He worked his jaw, then kept walking. A few steps further and he heard a voice.

_“Please—”_

His head snapped up. He didn’t remember who that was, didn’t know the name, but his entire being lit up with urgency. He couldn’t see a human figure, but he could hear chains jingling, feet scraping against a stone floor: someone getting forcefully dragged out of a cell, and the sound of ropes slithering against wood now, against polished wood, like a stake, maybe.

_“Where are you? Why didn’t you come back? Help! They’re going to burn me!”_

He could hear the whip of a flame crackling to life, cries of fear, _“Where are you? Help! Somebody help!”_ And then the words turning into screams, awful gut-churning screams, he had to stop them, he had to stop it, he had to run, to run towards the voice, now, now—

“No!” he shouted. His words felt so loud in the silence—because the silence hadn’t broken, not really; he hadn’t been hearing with his ears. “No. No. This isn’t real. This isn’t _real!”_

And once again, the illusion vanished; gone the sounds, gone the faint scent of smoke.

Panting, sweating, he felt angry and sick over this manipulative version of whoever the Forest had just impersonated. It wasn’t right, he knew: the words, the tone—none of it had been right. Though of course he had no real memory of the original.

“I’m a hunter,” he said again, shaky with rage and fear. The words felt small and laughable against the ever-wider darkness. The trees around him were tall and thin like cathedral pillars. “I’m a hunter. I’ve come for the firebird. I’m not going anywhere!”

And the antlers’ gouges hadn’t gone anywhere, either, still sort of glowing in the darkness. His night vision was playing tricks on him; he was seeing actual colors now, red and orange and yellow flaring in the white, like inner fire.

He started walking towards them once more. This time they actually seemed to come closer; but just as he approached them for good, they started to heal, the pale flesh of the trees puckering up into ridges of bark.

“Hey,” Bucky said, breaking into a run, “hey, no, come on—”

He saw the white wounds glow fully incandescent as they closed, as if licked by flames; by the time he had reached them, they were gone completely. Around him all the trees were exactly the same now. He had lost his only landmark. If he hadn’t been fully lost before, he was now.

For a few moments there was just darkness and silence.

And then he heard something.

It was coming to him, heavily, slowly, step after pounding step. This wasn’t like the city. This wasn’t like the calls for help. This was real. He could hear it in his stomach and his bones; the pine needles rustled and trembled.

He swiveled round, his hand going to his crossbow again. At first he didn’t see anything: then something _moved._ A shadow looming between the trees. He took a step back. It was taller than him. As it got closer, he realized it was taller than any man or beast he had ever seen.

For a moment he thought it was the giant deer again, but it was a fleeting thought, because even in the darkness he could tell the shapes were _wrong_. It was oddly square, heavy, with a sort of pointed head.

And then as it came closer, pulling itself out of the darkness, he saw it was a _house_ —with two large bird legs, sinking into the floor talons longer than his entire body, falling to one side then the other as it walked its lopsided bird walk.

The witch house stopped in front of him. He felt himself watched through the windows—or maybe _by_ the windows, square eyes staring down at him, glowing with fire though no smoke came out of the chimney. The porch was triangular and pointed like a beak. He just stared, too stunned to do anything else. There was perfect silence now, save for the furious beat of his heart.

And then the house attacked.

Bucky plunged to the side when one of the bird feet struck; the massive talons sank into the ground, missing him by an inch, but already the house was coming after him again, pushing him back to scramble backwards into the needles. Claws dugs great trenches into the soil, heady pine scent rising all around him. He was still holding his crossbow, but he never thought about using it; this was a _house._ What was an iron bolt going to do? Scratch the walls?

“Don’t,” he said—and had to dodge another massive strike, branches snapping and cracking overhead, a rain of twigs falling over him. “Don’t, please! I’m not here to fight, I…” Gnarled roots were hurting his hands as he reached behind himself. The trees were growing closer again, their branches lower, barring his way. The Forest was gathering for the kill. The house was coming at him ferociously, windows burning bright with flame, huge bird feet coming down and down, trying to crush him like a gnat, claws raking the ground as they reared up again. He couldn’t see anything; the squares of fire were eating into his night vision. If he only had a light—if he had fire of his own…

He scrambled at his pack suddenly, shook it again over the ground, not caring where the precious smoked meat went to roll, not caring about his clothes spreading over the pine needles—he had another near-miss, an explosion of wood over his head, a shower of pine needles; he found himself backed against a tree, but his hands found the silk wrappings, found the soft warmth of the feather inside—and he slipped it out in one swooping gesture to brandish it over his head like a torch.

And the house stopped.

For a while they stared at each other, Bucky gasping for breath, hard roots digging into his back, the feather burning bright in his straining hand. The house’s windows seemed to flicker in time with it, as if Bucky had pulled a flame directly from the fire inside.

Then the door clicked open and a shadowed silhouette appeared in the doorframe.

“Where the hell,” said a voice, “did you find _that?”_

*

After the house had lowered itself to the ground—landed, for lack of a better term, the bird legs folding up and sinking seamlessly into the pine-needle cover—Bucky remembered he was still lying sprawled on the ground, and realized he was shaking with all his limbs. He was staring wide-eyed at the woman on the porch.

 _She_ didn’t seem shocked, just impatient.“ Well? Don’t just lie there. The house might decide to set off again, you know.”

Bucky pushed himself up with an effort. His whole body ached. He had to gasp for breath a few more times before he managed words. “ _The_ house? It’s… it’s not yours?”

The woman’s lips curled into a smile, on the left side only. “Do I _look_ like Baba Yaga?”

Bucky had to admit she didn’t; she was young, and pretty enough if you favored slender over fat. Only there was something a bit—wild about her. Maybe it was her red hair, loose and curling at the ends, without a scarf or anything upon her head. Or maybe it was the men’s nightshirt she was wearing, torn and stained with blood.

Following his gaze, she looked down at herself. “It’s not mine.”

 _The nightshirt or the blood?_ Bucky wondered.

She patted the doorjamb and turned away, going back inside. “You really should come in.”

It felt like a very bad idea. But Bucky thought of the dark gaping woods, of how small he’d been feeling, and made a decision. If this house was prowling around, he might as well be where it could never reach him.

He took a deep breath, then walked in, holding the feather in one hand and the crossbow in the other. The inside of the house was about what he’d expected—a cot with a straw mat, a table, chairs and shelves of unvarnished lumber. He supposed there had to be a fireplace, what with the orange light reflecting off the walls, but no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t look directly at it.

Apart from that detail, it was a shabby, modest house, but clean and well cared for. Being inside this smaller space, after the oppression of the unending woods, was a deep relief.

The door slammed on its own behind him, which seemed par for the course. He put down the crossbow on a small table, but clung to his feather. It was so warm and so kind; he didn’t want to let go of it.

His host ignored the feather, for all that it had first caught her attention, and looked very interested in the crossbow instead, though she wouldn’t come near it. “You’re a hunter?”

“I… yes.”

“But you didn’t even try to shoot. Why not? The house was going to kill you.”

“I’ve come for the firebird,” he said. “That’s all.”

That made her stop and look at him. She had very clear green eyes; as she stood there, he realized that her torn nightshirt was see-through in places, and that she was very much naked underneath. He averted his eyes quickly.

“How do you _know_ you’ve come for the firebird?” she asked.

Bucky knew he shouldn’t trust her, no more than he trusted silver cities or giant deer. He couldn’t get that faint glimpse of her body out of his mind.

“It’s what I’ve come for,” he said rigidly. “I’m a hunter.”

“But you shouldn’t _know_ that _._ Those who walk into the Forest forget all about _why._ Next you’ll tell me you remember your name.”

“I do,” he said, glancing at her again. “It’s Bucky.”

Her eyes went briefly very wide; then she smiled that ironic, halved smile once more. “Is that so.”

Everywhere he looked, his gaze caught: her eyes, of course, her full, rosy lips, but also the subtle shifting of the sinews in her neck, the imperceptible bluish line of a vein under her milky skin. The curve of her hips, the shape of her thighs under the nightshirt. Every little detail made him want to stare like he’d never seen a woman before. And he hadn’t, really—not like that.

This wasn’t sorcery. This was definitely just him. He looked away again; he had only looked for a second and it had been a second too much.

“ _Well,”_ she said. “If you want to find the firebird…”

He kept staring at the wall, keeping her in the corner of his eye. “You know where it is?” he asked.

She only raised an eyebrow at him, then went on, “If you want to find the firebird, you’ll have to give me something in return.”

Bucky realized his gaze had gotten away from him again. He was looking at her shirt collar, which had slipped off her shoulder, and where the gentle swell of a breast was making itself known under the flimsy cloth.

People said witches fed on young men.

Once more, he averted his eyes, looking down this time. “What do you want?”

“No, no,” she said, looking amused. “This isn’t how it works. First you pledge yourself to me, then I tell you what I want.”

 _Careful,_ Bucky thought. He knew a few tales, though of course he didn’t remember where he’d heard them. He couldn’t just strike any deal. He had to watch his words.

“Three tasks,” he said. “I’ll pledge myself for three tasks.”

She still sounded amused. “All right. Three.”

“And you can’t ask me to,” he hesitated, eyes flickering up, “you can’t ask me to hurt someone.” It felt like a good condition, which preserved not only others, but also himself. This was as clever as he felt he could be right now.

She looked surprised for a blink of an eye; then it was gone. “Deal, _Bucky.”_

“Deal,” he echoed, trying not to notice the way her red hair curved just under the chin to tickle the line of her jaw. “What’s _your_ name?”

“It’s Natasha,” she said at once.

Just then the walls trembled; Bucky fell down and grabbed at the doorframe in a panic when the floorboards leaned forward, then backwards. _The house was getting up._ The furniture, he couldn’t help but notice, was all carefully tucked all around the room like a puzzle game, so none of it fell over as the house got to its feet. Natasha hadn’t lost her balance one bit, only shifting her weight with practiced ease. After the house had risen, it was better for a moment; but then it started to walk and Bucky lost his balance again. Natasha’ body accompanied the movement, like a sailor on a rough sea.

“Tired?” she asked, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

Even in the middle of his clinging, Bucky realized then he was at the end of his rope. He couldn’t remember for how long he’d walked around the forest, laboring in the soft pine needles that ate his strength like sandy ground; he thought maybe it had been the whole day, or even more.

Before he could answer, Natasha pulled her nightshirt completely over her head; he turned away from her white naked body in a panic. He’d seen just a flash—it was burned on the inside of his eyelids now.

“Are you coming?” she said, climbing into bed.

“No,” Bucky said in a strangled voice. “No, I’ll—I’ll take the floor.”

“Suit yourself.”

He kept his eyes averted a long time after she’d disappeared under the quilt; then, when his body began to ache, he folded himself over the floor with the feather held tight against his heart. He was scared, and he wasn’t sure what was happening, but right this second he was probably safe. At least for a few hours. The room was warm enough, bright with fire—he assumed it was fire, since he couldn’t directly look at the hearth. He wasn’t cold and that was all that mattered.

The lopsided gait of the house wasn’t so bad once you got used to it, like the rocking of a cradle, lulling him into sleep.

*

A finger poked him in the cheek.

“Wake up.”

Without thinking, he moved to drag his pillow over his head. Then he remembered there was no pillow, remembered he wasn’t home—remembered he didn’t even remember home—and sat up all at once.

Clear morning sun was streaming in from the windows. Natasha was crouched over him, looking down at him curiously. In daylight, she looked incredibly beautiful. But like a cat or a bird was beautiful: Bucky knew instinctively that if she had looked completely different, he would have found her beautiful also, and just as strange. Something about the way she moved. Her pale skin was hypnotizing him. It looked so soft.

 _It’s a spell,_ he told himself. But he knew it wasn’t true. And admonishing himself made little difference. 

She wasn’t wearing her nightshirt anymore, but a black outfit like his own, complete with the red star on the left shoulder. He opened his mouth to say those were men’s clothes, then thought better of it. She certainly didn’t need him to point it out. And besides, she wasn’t really a woman. She _looked_ like one for sure, but she wasn’t even trying to make it a good imitation, not in the way she acted and talked.

“We’re at the pond,” she said.

“The pond?” He got up and saw that the house was sitting down again. The forest outside was brilliantly lit, though they were still very, very deep inside; somehow the trees were letting the sunlight reach the ground again. Tucked between the pines, in a little cove of grey rock, was a pond indeed, clear and inviting under the sun.

“Let’s go wash up,” she said, and went outside.

He looked around the place and realized he could look at the hearth now. It was empty, without the slightest trace of soot or ashes, though the house was still so warm a fire must have burned there all night. He stared at it for a moment but it didn’t yield any of its secrets.

“Coming?” Natasha called.

Bucky followed her out warily, glancing over his shoulder. “Won’t the house leave without us?”

“No, it loves me. Come on.”

When Bucky looked again, she had already contrived to divest herself of clothing. He closed his eyes hard, then reopened them; this was starting to feel like a trap in which he kept falling. If she offered herself to the eye, then he would look. That way she could not take him by surprise.

First he undressed, too, carefully folding the firebird feather into his clothes; then he went into the water. It felt heavenly licking up his thighs.

Natasha was standing there already, wetting her wrists and the back of her neck. She was looking at him intently with her green eyes. Of course, now that Bucky had given himself license to look, he simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. His eyes wouldn’t stay on her. Eventually, she let herself slip back into the water so it covered her up to the neck, and he glanced furtively at her again; _she_ was staring so much, still, that he couldn’t help turning away from her a little, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

“You’ve got a lot of scars,” she said.

“I do?” Bucky twisted to try and see his own back. He caught sight of it in the water and saw the old, stretched-out whip marks. “Oh. Yes.”

“Who did that to you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, slowly sitting down in the water. It was cold, but he wanted to hide himself. He truly didn’t remember where the scars came from, but it still felt like he was lying.

“Are you a criminal? Criminals get public whippings.”

The way she said it was odd, like she’d only heard it somewhere. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “Would it change anything?”

“I guess not.”

He glanced at himself again, surreptitiously. His troubled reflection told him he had dark shaggy hair, and an angular, shadowed face. He was glad she did not seem scared by him, at least.

She flicked water at him with his foot. “You pledged yourself to me last night, do you remember that?”

“Yes,” he said—then, “Wait. For three tasks only.”

“Whatever. All I have to do is never assign you a third task. You’re basically my slave for life.” She flicked more water at him. “Don’t look so shocked. You should know better than to bargain with strangers in the Forest.”

Bucky managed to close his mouth enough to articulate words. “I can’t stay with you for life.”

“Why not?”

“I have somewhere to be, I have to—”

“To what?”

“I don’t _know,”_ he snapped, then closed his eyes hard. For a little while, he just sat there in the soft lapping of the water, trying to control his frustration. When he reopened his eyes, he had calmed down. “That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“It doesn’t,” he repeated with finality. He could perjure himself and be cursed. So what? He was going to end up cursed anyway—this bit of knowledge was inseparable from the idea of hunting a firebird. He had already bargained himself away, and Natasha was his best lead, so he might as well go along with it.

She was looking at him like she was trying to read his mind. “You know what? Your first task will be to answer all of my questions truthfully.”

“That’s not a task.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No. A task is something you do one time. It has a beginning and an end. Like chopping wood or milking a goat.”

She stood up in the water so suddenly he didn’t have time to look away again—and found this time that he couldn’t look away, like a moth caught into the flame. Her breasts were small and well-shaped, veined with blue. The pond had made them perk up; her skin pebbled in the open air. His eyes followed a drop of water down her toned stomach, into her navel. Then his eyes strayed to the dusting of red hair between her legs, the brazen line of her firm, muscled thighs, and he felt himself react so readily he was suddenly very thankful for the fresh water.

Her eyes had narrowed with anger. “I don’t have to keep pretending you have a choice. You’ve been an ignorant fool, too bad. By your true name, Bucky, I command you: you will tell me the truth and always the truth. Say it!”

He did not say it. Her posture went a bit less rigid; she blinked, then repeated, “I command you,” almost like a question.

“I heard you the first time,” he offered, just as confused. He was looking at her face now, trying to get a hint.

Her nostrils flared. “So you gave me a fake name. Not as fool as I thought. I see now that I should have—”

“Um,” he interrupted. “If it changes anything, I thought it was my real name. It was embroidered on my handkerchief.”

This time she completely lost her momentum, looked at him for a few seconds, then sat down in the water again. “Your _handkerchief_?”

“I had it in my pocket so I figured—I mean, it did _feel_ like my name. But I guess I was wrong.”

“I should have known,” she mumbled, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “What kind of name is _Bucky_ anyway?”

A thought occurred to him. “Hey. By your true name, Natasha, I command you to splash yourself in the face.”

She just looked flatly at him.

He smiled. “Okay, thought so.”

“You’re not clever,” she said. “You’re just lucky.” When all she got in answer was a shrug, she exclaimed, “And you’re not a _hunter._ A hunter would have tried to fuck me or kill me by now. They always do.”

He blinked at her.

“Well, where do you think I got all my clothes?” she said impatiently. “Hunters are all I ever meet in the Forest. And none of them ever remember anything about _anything_.”

Another revelation dawned on Bucky. “You’ve lost your memories too.”

“Everyone does here, I told you,” she said. “You’re not special.”

“I’ll pledge to always tell you the truth,” he allowed. “But only if you pledge the same thing to me.”

She snorted, eyes closed under the sun. “Nobody in their right mind would pledge to always tell the truth.” Then one green eye opened. “How about this: I can ask you three true questions. When you’ve answered them all, I’ll owe you three.”

“No. One for one.”

She grinned. “So you _can_ be taught. All right, one for one.”

Bucky realized he liked her. It was a surprising thing. She had basically swindled him into eternal enslavement, then tried to put a spell on him when he didn’t do what she wanted, _then_ tried to swindle him into eternal truthfulness.

But she did not get angry when he talked back. Instead she smiled at him.

“Okay, true question,” she asked. “How old are you?”

“Twenty,” Bucky blurted out before he could shape the words _I don’t know._ Then he frowned. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Is that a true question?”

He was the one to give her a flat look this time, and she grinned again. “To see if it worked against the Forest’s spell, of course. Some things are harder to forget than others. They come back up.”

“Oh,” he said, impressed. Still, she had more or less wasted her question, which now allowed him to use one in return. He hesitated, then said: “True question. What is my first task?”

She wrinkled her nose. “You are no fun.”

He didn’t answer anything. Deep down, even though he couldn’t access the reason why, he knew he didn’t have much time.

“All right, fine, enough play.” Turning away, she rose out of the water again; her wet body glistened like porcelain in the sun, and Bucky could no longer look away from her long thighs, and the marked shape of her hips, and her round, muscled ass. He felt his entire body crave her in a way that was quickly becoming painful.

“Come along,” she said. “We’re going dancing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Do tell us what you think :D
> 
> [Art on Tumblr](https://artgroves.tumblr.com/tagged/Hunger-of-the-Pine)


	3. Chapter 3

# 3.

In daylight, the house sat as motionless as if it had been built there, near the little pond, tranquil and homely. Still, Bucky didn’t like the thought of leaving it behind; he looked over his shoulder several times as they went deep into the forest.

“Relax,” Natasha said. “The house wouldn’t walk off empty.”

She had dressed in her black leather clothes again; they fit her a bit too closely for comfort. The shirt opened at the top, which Bucky tried not to _keep noticing_. He felt like he was touching her with his eyes.

“Will we find our way back?” he asked.

“Of course. At least, I will.”

He needed to distract himself both from his fear and his yearning. “How did you come to live there?”

“Luck,” she answered vaguely.

Bucky hesitated, then said, “True question.”

She scowled. “Really? All right. I was wounded and I needed shelter. The house had been abandoned long ago. It just came to me.”

Bucky wanted to ask for more details, but just then a glint of silver attracted his attention: when he looked up, there was the suspended city again, clinging to the top of the pines. It still felt as uninteresting to him as before. “Oh—I saw that yesterday.”

“I’m not surprised. Heven tries to attract all wanderers.”

“What? Heaven?”

“Nearly. They’re mimics. That’s how they eat.”

Bucky opened his mouth to ask what the hell she meant, but decided he didn’t need to know and said instead, “But it feels so dull. _Oddly_ dull. It’s a city in the trees. I should be at least surprised.”

“That’s because you have the feather,” she answered absently. “It won’t let life-threatening magic get to you. You see it for what it is—smoke and mirrors, barely anything real.”

There were the stairs again, still wrapped around the trunk, gleaming ethereal, almost white. Bucky looked up anxiously at Heven. Now that he forced himself to pay attention, it did look like bait: shiny baubles suspended overhead, to catch flies or fish.

Or something bigger.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why do you need me? Will I have to fight?”

“I told you. We’re going dancing.”

*

Climbing the stairs, they stepped into the suspended hall, which turned out to be an antechamber of sorts. Everything inside was silver, rotund and sleek like the inside of an orb-and-cross. When he turned around, Bucky could see his own distorted reflection run along the room, as if fleeing his gaze.

At the other end, the orb opened on a frail silver bridge, glittering like a spiderweb in the morning dew. It led to the next tree, the next spherical construction; distant sounds of viola and harpsichord floated through, along with a soft light and the sound of laughter.

Someone came out to meet them, and only when they were halfway across the bridge did Bucky realize it was an _angel._

Or—not an angel. A mimic, again. It looked like a woman, her skin silver as well, just like her hair and eyes, with perfectly straight hair falling down her back like a waterfall of mercury. Her great wings were clearly alive, part of her, and yet seemingly entirely cosmetic, much too short to be of any real use.

When she smiled, her teeth were very sharp.

 _“Fear not, travelers._ _You will be granted—”_

“We are no travelers. We have come for the ball,” Natasha cut off. She pulled Bucky’s arm closer to her. “They say there’s a prize for the winner. And, see? I’ve got a partner this time.”

The angel seemed disappointed, but then smiled again, even brighter. _“Of course. No harm could befall those who’ve come to dance. May the best couple win.”_

“Glad to hear it. Now where are the changing rooms?”

They followed her across the bridge. This time, the spherical building wasn’t gleamingly empty, but full of gowns and suits and dresses, all of silver, suspended on racks curving along with the walls. Bucky’s head was beginning to hurt; there was no beauty left in this constant monochrome, only eye fatigue, like all color had been leached from the world.

He looked at Natasha’s hair to strengthen himself, this vibrant red. She seemed tense, focused, like they were in much greater danger than he realized. The second the angel bowed and left them—through a second bridge, leading to yet another sphere—Natasha started browsing the dresses with quick, flicking gestures.

“We have to hurry,” she said. “If we are late to the ball, we’re no longer responding to an invitation, and we’re no longer protected by the laws of hospitality.”

Bucky had heard a thing or two about hospitality being important to the fae. “What if we _had_ been travelers?”

“Heven gives nothing for nothing. They would have extended hospitality to us, and then, once we’d accepted it, asked for something in exchange. Every day we stayed, until we had nothing left of us to give. But the ball is them _asking_ people to come, so we don’t have to give them something. Unless we overstay our welcome.”

“This is why you couldn’t come before? Because you never had anyone to dance with?”

She didn’t look up from the dresses, pulling out this and that, piling garments on the gleaming floor.

“What’s the prize?” he asked.

“You’ll find out when we win.”

“I can’t dance, though.”

“You don’t know that.”

“My body knows. I don’t think I ever learned.”

“Well then.” She threw him the gown she’d picked for herself. “I’ll just have to lead.”

Bucky blinked at her. “What?”

She was getting rid of her clothing—again—and putting on a white shirt, a silver jacket, silver bouffant trousers and boots, and a great silver-plumed hat. When she turned to face him, she was a man with red curls, beardless; and Bucky realized his own body didn’t fit his clothes as well as it did just a moment ago.

Part of the wall was flat, to be used as a mirror. Bucky looked at himself there and saw a pale young woman with dark hair and a serious gaze. He gasped; tears slowly came to his eyes.

“Oh, no, no,” Natasha said. Her voice had turned into a light tenor. “We don’t have time for this. It’s not such a big deal. And besides, you’ve pledged yourself to me, I can do what I like to you.”

“It’s not that.” Bucky wiped his tears away. His voice sounded the same in his head, yet different to his ears; the discrepancy felt stranger than anything else. “I look like my… my sister.”

Natasha stopped. “What?”

“I think I’d forgotten her face. Even before I came to the Forest. Maybe that’s why it can come back now.” He took a bracing breath, then wiped his tears again. “Sorry. I’m ready.”

“You are?”

“Like you said. We don’t have time.” She was testing him, he knew. Being turned into a woman was far from the worst thing her magic could have done to him. “How do I put this on?”

He noticed her looking at him strangely while he dressed, like she was having second thoughts, maybe, but he said nothing. His body did feel odd; he didn’t like this feeling very much, not seeing what he expected in the mirror. But if Natasha expected him to cave in the face of humiliation, to make him perjure himself so soon, she would find she still had a long way to go. Bucky may not have his memories, but he knew—he felt—he was used to enduring much worse.

*

Corsets, Bucky decided as they walked across the bridge into the ballroom, did _not_ belong in Heaven—nor in Heven, for that matter. No wonder ladies always fainted in stories. The silver thing he wore under his gown was making his ribs ache so badly he almost didn’t notice the splendor of the immense spherical silver hall, with its glinting crystal chandeliers and its hordes of angels twirling to and fro across the mirror floor. There was no music yet, not as such; the orchestra, instruments playing by themselves in a corner, was still busily tuning itself. The angels were just practicing steps. There were so many couples, all silver people, no other humans. Spread-out wings met themselves with no fuss, as though they had no substance. Nothing here had substance except Natasha, even wearing a man’s body.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her handsome brow was furrowed.

“It’s a bit hard to breathe,” Bucky answered. His hand tightened on hers. “How long do we have to dance?”

“Until seven. We have to be the last couple standing.” She pulled him in front of her—she was taller than him, now—and braced her arm around his waist, her other hand coming up to grab his.

Faintness nearly overcame him. He wasn’t in a state for a trial of endurance. “I haven’t eaten in too long, I think,” he managed to say. Close to two days if he was counting right.

Her green eyes bore into his. “You don’t want to eat anything here.”

“Why not?” Bucky’s eyes strayed to the magnificent tables laden with meat.

The carcasses were gleaming, too, but curiously so, as if congealed in quicksilver. It took him a few seconds to realize he was not looking at animal cuts. When he saw curling, frozen fingers at the end of a piece of meat, ice washed all over him.

She must have felt him falter, because she firmed her grip. “Don’t look. Don’t think. Just let me lead you.”

Bucky did not know how to be a woman, but he could follow when he was being led. He tried not to think. He tried to learn the steps. He could not die here, not now.

Dancing started hurting quickly enough, in his ribs and his back and his feet. Still no real music, only discordant sounds in the background; Natasha was counting time under her breath. _One-two-three._ The angels twirling around them were politely parting to let them through, but following them with their eyes—hungry, fevered eyes.

Everything was ethereal, fleeting silver; after a while, it felt like dancing in streaks of mercury. The only real thing was Natasha’s hot breath in his ear, deep and regular as she twirled him, brought him back, held him close, counting, explaining, telling him when he mistepped. _One-two-three. Back, forward, left, twirl. Do it again._ Her movements were practiced and certain like a fighter’s. Bucky found himself wondering how well she hunted.

He must not let his mind wander. It was hard to focus. He was so hungry, and this wasn’t like any dance he knew, foreign, fancy, belonging to the circle of tsars. The metal corset was bending his ribs. He was seeing dark spots.

“Bucky,” he heard her say in his ear. _“Focus.”_

“I’m sorry.” He came out of his daze with an effort. “It’s hard to breathe.”

“Damn it. This won’t do. If you faint, we’ll be as good as dead.” She held him upright with strength that had nothing to do with their differing bodies. In the distance Bucky could heard several instruments coming in tune with each other at long last, sounds gathering into the beginning of a song. “The ball’s about to start. We can’t switch unless—do you think you can learn the steps in time?”

“It’s, um.” Bucky made an effort. The room was swaying. “Three steps left, two steps right, twirl, turn, dip, go again but invert everything. Then repeat. I think.”

She stared at him.

“Is that right?” he asked.

She just said, “Yes.”

And as she said so, he felt the garments of femininity leave him, clothing and body both. He shut his eyes in relief as his chest was allowed to expand again; when he reopened them, they were still holding hands, with her leading, him being led. But Natasha was the one wearing a silver gown, and he the silver suit. He was taller than her again.

He felt the plumed hat bloom upon his head, ostrich feathers coming down to brush his cheeks. He had never worn clothes so finely woven.

“I may lead, then?” he asked in the face of the obvious.

She was giving him that odd considering look again. “It would seem so.”

“Can _you_ breathe?” he asked with a frown. The silver corset had changed owners, too.

“Yes. I’m used to it.”

He was still pretty sure she was some kind of witch or monster under the guise of a woman, but still he noticed the curve of her neck, the shape of her mouth, the light of her eyes; and still he noticed she was not being cruel to him.

“Your hand,” she said, calling him back to his senses. “The one on my shoulder. Move it down to my waist.”

“Oh—yes.” They switched so he was the one leading, and he felt even more troubled with her firm body under his hand. It would have been so easy to bring her flush against him, to bury his face against her skin, breathe her in. So close to death and she was all he could really see. It was like vertigo, making him want to fall.

The fingers of their joined hands laced together. He held her gaze. Complete silence fell.

The music started, and, in unison with fifty couples of angels, they began to dance.

At first he only focused mechanically on the steps, anxious not to miss one: left, right, back, forth, twirl, turn, dip. Repeat, reverse. But as his body finished learning the moves, he let himself look around and saw a myriad of angels spinning all around them. Their great silver wings rose towards the ceiling, feathers flitting in the glowing light. This _could_ have been Heaven, if not for the dismembered, petrified bits of corpse on the silver plates.

His hands started shaking; magic was so far beyond him. He looked down at Natasha again and saw that she had never stopped looking at _him_. Somehow, it helped him chase his fear away. He thought: _if they attack, I will fight for her._ And he knew he would not have time to be afraid when he fought; and that was a relief. Then he thought: _if they attack, she will fight for me._ And he had no doubt she would defend him, because he was her property; and that was a comfort.

“Why are you staring?” she asked, low, like she was genuinely curious about the answer.

It was becoming easier and easier to dance without thinking. He surprised himself enjoying it for itself despite the circumstances; enjoying how light their steps were, how coordinated they were now, like they were making something, the both of them, bodies moving together.

“I was thinking,” he said quietly, “you’re a good master to me.”

“Really?” She waited till he’d twirled her. “Was your freedom so poor before?”

“I don’t think I was free before,” he said as he brought her close again.

“You’re a hunter.”

“I must be,” Bucky said, “yes,” and dipped her very low.

When she came back up, she said, “You’ve come here to cage things and kill things.”

“It would seem so. And?”

Her dress was swishing around her, glinting; it was luxurious as could be, but he caught himself thinking he knew how she looked underneath, how she would look dancing naked without those acres of stifling silver cloth, and the thought made him appalled with himself but another voice, deeper down, said, _I don’t care. She’s so beautiful, and I might die._

He wanted so badly to taste the skin just below her earlobe. He wanted it like water before drowning.

“You know I won’t let you,” she said, and for a second he thought she meant the kissing. “You know I’ve killed all the hunters before you. That’s why I have their clothes. I’ve enslaved them, and I’ve killed them.”

“Did you bring any of them here to dance?”

She didn’t answer that. They were dancing so fluidly now it was as if they had trained years for this moment. Looking away from her for a split second, just enough to twirl and dip her again, Bucky saw that many couples of angels had stopped dancing to step back and look at them. They were winning.

“Why are we here?” he asked. “What do they have that you want?”

She stared at him for three beats of music, then said, “A firebird feather.”

“What?”

“I’m looking for them, too.”

He didn’t say he was looking for the bird and not the feathers; she knew. Instead he dipped her again. When he pulled her up, she was very close to him, and very warm—the same warmth his body remembered dreaming of, for years and years.

He didn’t want to understand. But he knew the steps perfectly now, so that when they spun into them for the hundredth time, it felt like they were fire together, both flames in the same hearth, gliding and twining in perfect unison. Her hair was the color of fire, too; and she felt so warm—

He almost mistepped and made her stumble, bringing her back at once. She blinked at him. “Bucky?”

“I’m sorry.” He kept dancing, but his movements were growing stiff. He was shivering all over. Faintness was overcoming him again. “It’s just—I’m cold.”

And she was warm. The slight distance between them suddenly felt like a glacial ocean. If he could get closer—

“Your _hand_ ,” she said, and he saw that the fingers on his left hand—the one holding hers, fingers intertwined—were growing silver at the tips.

Fear spiked through him, sharp like broken glass. “What’s happening to me?”

Her eyes had flitted to the clock over the table. It was past seven. Neither of them had noticed.

“The ball is over,” Bucky understood. Trespassing. Overextending their stay. The fae laws of hospitality—

His arm was silver to the wrist now—

“ _Keep dancing_ ,” she said.

The music was getting faster, shriller. Two couples were still dancing, too, angels with perfect silver skin and too-sharp grins. Of course this was always a trap. Of course the contest would go past the hour...

“As long as we keep dancing, we can still win! If we win, they can’t do anything to us!”

She had wings, too. Suddenly he couldn’t understand how he hadn’t noticed them before. They were just as ethereal as the angels’ silver wings, going through everything, tables and dancers alike; but hers were made of fire, ghostly vibrant fire, glowing in and out of sight.

On automatic, he sent her twirling, brought her back, and when he dipped her, her wings fanned out behind her so that she seemed to be resting on a fiery bed. She was missing three primary feathers in her left.

She got back up and her wings coiled protectively around them both, enclosing them in an incandescent cocoon. The angels around hissed and showed pointy teeth and sharp claws.

The cold was growing in Bucky’s arm. “Natasha…”

“Keep dancing,” she repeated, and her warmth flooded him. The light coming from her wings was so bright he couldn’t see the horrible room anymore, the soulless monochrome walls, the monstrous angels, the silver corpses on the table. Her hair was a live flame around her head. Her eyes were alive, glowing like jewels. If he could kiss her just once before they died, he thought. Just once. He didn’t care about anything else anymore. He was certain he had never kissed anyone.

His left arm was still transforming, up to the elbow now. It looked silver but felt leaden. It hurt so much that pain started twisting his face, shortening his breath.

The other dancers were beginning to distort in the corner of his eyes. Were angels not horrifying, in their true shapes? He caught sight of claws reaching for him, of feathers melting into scales, too many limbs on a single body, crowding them in as they kept dancing, dancing to keep the cold away—

“Look at me,” she said.

He did, and saw she was completely aflame now; it was alive under her skin, painting her lips coral, making her skin glow. Her wings had gained substance, become almost real; a brush of them set fire to woman’s dress, to general angelic outcry. He felt the heat catch onto his own clothes, but even as they started burning, he welcomed it—anything to distract him from the icy, heavy ache in his left arm. He couldn’t be warm enough, not if he moved but an inch away from her.

He gave in suddenly, pulled her flush against him, hid his face in the crook of her neck. It was such a relief he _ached._ If he could only get closer to her, if he could only melt inside—

“Almost there,” she breathed again, “we’re almost there—” and he whispered against her throat, “I can do it, I’ll do whatever you want, just let me stay here, right here—”

And it was her who pulled him tighter this time; and they danced the whole waltz again like this, with him pressed so close to her he hardly even felt the pain from his petrifying arm anymore.

And then the music stopped, suddenly: they stopped too, and he found himself struggling to catch his breath with pain and effort. All he could hear now was the roar of fire. He didn’t know what was going on anymore. He was burning hot and cold, shivering; he didn’t want to pull away from her.

“Bucky,” she said, out of breath too, and he looked up.

The entire room was burning. It was so strange; he knew he had walked into this room through the door, walked past the awful death-laden tables, walked all over the width of the silver floors; and yet it was burning all of apiece now, like a theatre décor. Behind it was nothing, just a grey blur.

“Take it!” the angels were screaming all around them, running around like mad hens, a flurry of monstrous limbs, eyes, tongues, claws, wings sprouting from every part of their body. “Take it and go! Take it! You win! Damn you! Take it!”

Bucky’s strength was leaving him. The pain was back in full force, making him grind his teeth so hard he could’ve shattered them. Despite the darkness threatening to overcome him, he saw that amidst all of the fire burned an even brighter flame: a single firebird feather hovering over their heads.

“Take it! Take it! Take it!”

Natasha wasn’t even looking at the feather, only at him, anxiously.

“I’m all right,” Bucky said wanly as dark spots gathered before his eyes. He only had time to see her pluck the feather out of thin air before his knees gave out from under him.


	4. Chapter 4

# 4.

Something deposited him gently on a carpet of deep green moss. He felt it tickle his nose as he inhaled its scent. The coolness pressing all over his body let him know he was naked; his silver clothes had burned off him entirely, leaving him unhurt.

The vegetal scent rose as he stirred. When he opened his eyes, he saw it wasn’t just moss underneath him, but also ferns and ivy, so comfortingly fresh after the scalding cold of silver. A bedding arranged for him. So many shades of green. And yet he still liked red better, the red of Natasha’s hair, sitting on a rock not far from him.

She was wearing nothing but tatters of her silver dress, burnt to a black crisp. The strips of white skin showing through glowed so much they hurt his eyes.

When he tried to sit up, a strange numbness by his side jogged his memories. He looked at his left arm and saw that it had gone entirely silver up to his shoulder. But it was cracked as if with heat, allowing for movement, and when he tried to move his fingers, they responded fine.

“I’ve done what I could,” Natasha said quietly. “It’s functional. Better than having no arm at all.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

“You shouldn’t thank me. I did this to you.”

He cautiously rubbed his new forearm. It was sleek and smooth, and he couldn’t feel his own touch; only pressure. “Did you get the feather?”

“I did.”

“You could burn them.” He remembered the angels’ shrieks of distress. “Why didn’t you go earlier? Take it by force?”

“Because you _can’t_ take a firebird feather by force. It has to be given.”

Bucky remembered his own feather, folded in his clothing. So this was why she hadn’t killed him right away like the others.

His body ached in a sort of stubborn way, like it knew it should have been gravely burned and insisted on hurting to make up for it. Or maybe it was muscle soreness—Bucky had no idea how _long_ they’d danced in the angels’ hall, but it felt like it could have been the whole day. Or two whole days.

Just as he had that thought, he realized he had never been so thirsty in his life. Staggering to his feet, he made his way towards the pond and stumbled in, quickly falling to his knees and bending down to drink water from his cupped hands. It was fresh and cool and felt like it was feeding him, too.

Wiping his mouth with the back of his arm, he turned around and saw that Natasha was staring at him. The rags of her dress were not enough to contain the curves of her body, and for once he didn’t look away. They watched each other for a little while.

When her eyes traced his shoulders for the third time, he couldn’t help asking, “Will that be my second task?”

She looked struck. “I’d never force you to do that.”

 _You wouldn’t have to force me._ He wanted to sink back in the coolness of the moss and leaves; he wanted to weep with exhaustion over his missing arm; he wanted to reach between his legs and take himself in hand and finally allow himself to be filled to the brim with thoughts of her. Let her fire come again, and this time consume him too.

Because there was fire, glowing against the high trunks. In the corner of his eye, he saw the flaming wings, still stretched out behind her. When he looked straight at her, they disappeared. He wished he had never seen them at all.

“I know you wouldn’t,” he said. “Like I said. You’re a good master to me.”

He got up and walked back to his makeshift bedding. His clothes—his real clothes, not the silver garments he’d had to wear—were folded nearby. He sat down, reached for them, but stopped when he saw Natasha rise in the corner of his eye.

He didn’t move as she walked to him. He still strove not to look at her directly; behind her, the entire forest was red and orange with the glow reflecting off her wings. She handed him something that clinked in her hand.

It was his crossbow, handle first.

He reached out to take it, puzzled, but she didn’t let go—leaned forward to set the iron bolt against her chest. Bucky felt his eyes widen. “What…”

“You’ve come to kill me,” she said. “Haven't you?”

“No,” he said, straining to pull the crossbow away, to look away from her flaming wings, to pretend he hadn’t noticed, he didn’t know, he had no idea what she even meant, but the farther away he looked the more he saw them, “not _you_ —”

“I’ve enslaved you,” she said, inflexible, “I’ve traded away a piece of your body for a piece of mine. Is that not reason enough?”

He pulled with his enchanted silver arm, which proved ten times stronger than his right and made her fall forward, pushing him back into the moss. She pinned him down, her hands on each side of his head; the iron bolt was still pressing against her chest, nearly breaking the skin.

“Won’t you shoot?” she asked. Everywhere he didn’t look, her wings were falling over them like a canopy of fire, but God, he had to keep not _looking—_

“No,” he breathed. “No.”

“That makes you a poor hunter. Won’t you shoot?”

_“No.”_

“Well, then,” she said, and bent down to kiss him.

Suddenly he realized he was the one holding the crossbow upwards; it was the easiest thing in the world to let go of it, let it fall aside and raise both hands to bury them in her hair. He closed his eyes and parted his lips and thought, _Thank God, thank God. One more second without this and I would’ve gone mad, thank God._

He could feel her thighs bracketing his hips, her breasts pressing against his chest, her tongue sliding in his mouth. His body was coming alive in response, his desire swelling, rising. A poor hunter indeed; his prey had managed to get the better of him, and there he was asking for more.

“Is this how you kill me?” he breathed in her mouth.

She smiled. “What if I say yes?”

In answer he kissed her again. This felt forbidden—as in forbidden to _him,_ specifically; but in the Forest he no longer knew who he was, and so he could pretend he didn’t know he was breaking the rules. He could feel every curve of her body against him, and raked his fingers down her back to rip off the tatters of her dress.

He was fully hard already, and he _knew_ she could feel it against her belly. He dug his fingers into her muscled back, wanting to hold her tighter; he realized he had hurt her at the noise she made, but it was a _pleased_ noise, and she pressed down on him even more, trapping his cock between their stomachs. He felt himself strain pathetically to get even harder. She shifted her hips to get astride his thigh, making herself comfortable, and he could feel how _hot_ she was there, warmth slicking up his skin. She was kissing him so much he couldn’t think; her contact deprived him of all his other senses, made him blind and deaf to anything but her.

“God,” he heard her whisper, “I want this too much,” and he thought _no, that’s me, that’s what I’ve been—_ but then she lifted herself off him, just enough that he couldn’t help grabbing her thighs so she couldn’t go away.

It made her stop. “No?” she asked in a puzzled voice.

“Don’t go,” he begged.

She raised an amused eyebrow. “Where do you think I'm going?” To his confused look she said, smiling more fully, “What, have you never had a woman be on top of you?”

“I’ve never had anyone,” he answered honestly.

Her grin went away. She slowly sat back. His chest was heaving with breath. He couldn’t look away now, not ever again; he wanted to memorize every detail of her face.

“Virginity is usually bargained at higher prices, you know,” she said eventually, in a surprisingly soft voice. “Don’t you want anything for your body?”

“Just yours,” he breathed. “God, just yours.”

Her gaze on him changed. She knelt up again, and this time he released his hold on her thighs, because—yes, she was reaching down, grabbing him, _God_ —holding him _up_ so she could—so she could come back down—

He felt the pressure, the slight moment of resistance and then oh, the _give,_ and the slow slide of their bodies coming together. It punched a shaky breath out of him. His hands had raised up again on their own volition to hold her, bring her down, flat over him, her mouth to his mouth; her tongue slipped inside him again, just like he was inside her— _inside her,_ and it felt so alarmingly intimate, taboo, and so good, so _good._

It was easy to know what to do now, because his body could tell; Bucky only had to follow. They moved in a series of swelling waves, going deeper, harder every time, and his pleasure rose and _rose_ until he could only see white stars. The cresting briefly felt like pure, clean terror; and then he was being released, eyes rolling back in his head, rigid, spending himself in hot spurts inside her.

He had arched back so much his head had dug a soft depression into the moss, his fingers still digging into Natasha’s creamy thighs. In a daze, he felt her slow down and stop as he softened inside her.

When she knelt up again to get off him, he shook off the afterglow with an intense effort: his work was not done. He sat up and pushed her on her back, eliciting a surprised, then pleased look when she realized he meant to go on.

He lay half-over her, his leg thrown over her leg, and just let her arrange herself as she wanted. He felt her thighs clamp around his thigh, her mouth find his mouth. She was still hot and wet inside, and _fluttering,_ so close to ecstasy he felt an echo of his own. She showed him how to move his fingers between her legs, and from then on he only had to let her lead him once more, until she was moaning again, arching again, pressing her lips to his shoulder and biting hard.

After that they just breathed, there by the pond in the dark, by the sleeping house, under the trees, until their breathing had gone silent.

Her fingers were tracing his body: his abdomen, his chest, his shoulders. Then his throat, his jaw; then his cheekbones, the arch of his brows. After a while he let himself touch her too, the dipping curve of her back, the swell of her ass, the length of her thighs. She smiled and kissed him again, and part of him thought in sudden despair _Forever, I want this forever._

Eventually sweat and stickiness won over, and they disentangled themselves. The forest was black as ink, but the pond not too cold to wash. Bucky staggered over and did it quick, splashing his naked body, not thinking about much of anything. He heard Natasha do the same not too far away.

He washed himself for a few minutes more. Then, wading out of the water, still dripping, he saw Natasha had vanished into the house already. Its windows were aglow. He saw again his black clothes, still folded on the ground.

And inside, warming them, his firebird feather.

He stared at it for a while. Water trickled off his hair and dripped quietly into the moss. His new arm made a strange sound as it moved. His entire body felt different, alight, like the touch of Natasha had changed him. The Forest had already changed him so much. It would have been very easy, unburdened by memory, to turn this into _forever,_ indeed.

He knew he had not been happy outside. If nothing else, the scars on his back told the story. He wanted to go back into the house naked, like she had, bearing only offerings: the feather, and himself.

But instead, slowly, he started pulling on his clothes, fitting the red star over his undead arm. It didn’t come easy; his body was still damp, impeding the process, like the outfit itself did not want to be worn again. He was not worthy of it, he knew. He had been so easily swayed from his mission. By the time he was done, the house was shuddering in its cove of pine needles, obviously rearing to go.

He slipped the feather inside his shirt, over his heart. He picked up his crossbow before he went to the door.

Natasha was sitting by the fire. She was still naked, and Bucky thought it really was what suited her best, not because she was beautiful, but because she wore it like clothing, without any self-consciousness. But when she saw him walk past the threshold in his hunter’s garments, with the crossbow in hand, she pushed to her feet at once.

“So this is your choice,” she said, very pale and dignified.

Bucky set his weapon aside. “No, I—”

“Pick that up,” she said. “You’re going to need it.”

The house started getting to its feet, unbalancing in two sharp upwards-downwards motions, and Bucky lost his balance. He rolled down the suddenly steep floors, which brought him smack in front of the hearth. This time his gaze didn’t glide over it anymore, maybe because he had been inside Natasha, soaked a bit of her magic. He saw what was in the chimney.

Not fire, but _flames_ —a _pile_ of flames, thrown all over each other, sticking out every which way, burning in different directions. Sewn together. A coat of flames. Natasha’s flames.

All of this happened under a second; the next moment, Natasha had slammed into him, fingers hooked into his clothing, his flesh, dragging him away from the hearth with amazing strength. He was too shocked to do anything more than twist onto his back; she was on top of him again within moments, naked and formidable.

“Wait,” he managed when her hand closed on his throat. Her foot was into the flames, power flowing into her veins; her hand grew talons and pierced Bucky’s skin. He scrabbled at them in a panic. “ _Wait,_ wait, I don’t want to fight—”

“You _came here to fight,”_ she said coldly, and squeezed tighter.

He felt blood pool in the hollow of his throat and, without thinking, shoved her back with his silver arm; she skidded across the room and nearly slammed into the bed, catching herself at the last minute, already getting her legs under her to push back up. She froze when he rolled _away_ from the hearth instead of seizing her coat of flames. He tucked himself at the other end of the room, eyes wide, hands up. “Please,” he panted. “Please.”

“Do you think I won’t kill you just because I’m naked?” She got up again, an eyebrow raised like they were just having a slightly animated discussion. Her hands were black, scaly bird claws, morphing into human skin again now that she was away from the hearth. “I’m telling you, others have made that mistake before.”

“Please, stop, just—I didn’t know you’d be a person!” he said as she was about to pounce again.

She stopped herself so suddenly she stumbled.

“I didn’t know. I was there to catch a bird. I’m not going to fight you,” Bucky said, hands still raised. His throat stung where she’d clawed him, but he wasn’t bleeding badly. “I want to give up my mission. But I don’t know _what it is_ exactly _._ So I can’t renounce it yet. It would have no meaning.”

Silence fell, if it could be called so with the regular muffled thumps of the house’s massive feet underneath. Natasha stared at him, breathing hard.

Then she saw him looking at her body and sneered. “You all want the same thing.”

 _“You_ wanted _me,”_ Bucky protested. “I gave myself to you!”

She stiffened at once. “I didn’t force you.”

“No. You didn’t. I’d give myself again.” He caught his breath. “And again, and again.”

Her expression wavered. She was completely human again, pale fingers nothing like claws. She said, “ _Okhotnik_.”

 _Hunter._ Swallowing, he named her right back. “ _Żar-ptak_.”

Her lips tightened. Of course they both knew he knew, but saying it out loud made it all real.

“You are still pledged to me,” she said, like a question.

“For two more tasks. Yes. I don’t renounce that.” He walked to her, carefully. “Let me help you find the missing pieces of you. So we can leave this place. And then we can fight again if—if it’s needed.”

Her hand shot out to grab him at the throat again. She looked at him, nostrils flaring; he stayed very still, tilting his chin up in her grip. When she started bringing him down, he went only too willingly, kneeling on the hard floor. The house’s gait was barely a factor now, just a gentle roll like they were at sea.

Bucky looked up. Natasha met his eyes with what looked like challenge. Her hand moved from his throat to his hair. He was so close to the mound of red hair between her legs, the dark pink inside.

He was about to lean forward when she wound his hair around her hand to drag his head back. “You give it freely, too?”

“Everything,” he said quietly, and leaned forward again.

This time she didn’t stop him.

He loved the taste immediately, all-consumingly. Wiry red hairs scraped against his beard; he pushed his face closer so that she had to spread her legs, lean back on the edge of the bed behind her. He let her hands manipulate him, her moans guide him, into a slick, regular rhythm. She arched against him, pressed his face further into her, and he licked deep inside her, ate and drank her. Untouched, he was getting hard again, tenting his hunter’s breeches.

When she came, he _felt_ it, with his lips and the point of his tongue, and he only pressed further in to have more. Her thighs, which had strained and tensed like steel bands, were suddenly wobbly and feeble; she slid down almost all at once, sitting on the floor with him, and grabbed his face and kissed herself out of his mouth and gasped, “I really _should_ kill you,” before he kissed her back.

*

This time he climbed into bed with her, both of them naked again. It was a cozy thing, with a thick straw mat that still smelled of summer; the quilt over them seemed to be stuffed with wool. Going to bed with someone was an entirely new feeling, too. As Natasha fitted her body alongside his, throwing an arm around his chest and burrowing like a cat, Bucky felt again his own desperate yearning. _Forever, why can’t I have this forever. Why not renounce my mission unknown. Nothing else could be as good as this._

The house kept prowling the woods. The coat of flames, balled up in the hearth, pulsed with a lively glow. Bucky rubbed the back of Natasha’s neck, ran his fingers through her hair. “Couldn’t I just borrow the coat?”

She raised her head to skewer him with a green gaze that reminded him very much of a suspicious cat. He couldn’t help smiling. “I mean—this is it, right? The power. Since you can take it off, you could hand it over for a little while...”

Natasha snorted and rested her head on his chest again. “You couldn’t wear it, _okhotnik._ There’s a prerequisite.”

He blinked at her. “You didn’t always wear it?”

For a moment he expected her to say she didn’t remember, but she simply answered, “No, I didn’t.”

“What’s the prerequisite?”

She yawned wide. “Not for you to know.”

“True question.”

“It’s not your turn,” she eluded, and settled more comfortably against him.

He watched her pretend to sleep for a little while, and then he closed his eyes and fell asleep for real, warm and safe with her as the house carried them into the dark.

*

When he woke up, it was the hour that just precedes dawn. The glow of the hearth was barely perceptible anymore, giving way to a thin, clear light. The house was still upright, not walking but shifting from leg to leg; he could feel it in his body.

Pushing up on his elbows, he saw that Natasha was at the window, her nudity bathed in a pure morning glow. There was something black strapped around her left thigh, and clothing fixtures around her wrists; obviously she had stopped in the process of getting dressed to watch the sunrise. She turned and smiled at him, then beckoned him over.

He slipped out of bed to join her, obedient, shivering. As he came up to the window, he felt his eyes go wide. The giant deer were there, right outside, a male and two female, quietly eating lichen off the tallest trees.

Seeing them from up high somehow only made them seem more unreal. Slowly, he leaned against the windowsill. Natasha settled back, too, and said nothing. Their breaths fogged up side by side in the cold morning air.

It was a long time before the deer finally walked off, so graceful they might have weighed nothing at all. Bucky realized it was dawn now, for good; the sky overhead, through the dark branches, was pale pink and pastel blue. The house took one step away, then another, and finally trod off into the woods.

“It’s not all bad here,” Natasha said quietly.

 _I’ve never known anything better,_ Bucky didn’t say. He couldn’t back it up with any specific memories if she asked, and he certainly couldn’t explain why he was still clinging to his mission despite this desperate, aching need to stay.

“Why can’t you leave the Forest?” he asked instead.

“Because I’m still missing two feathers. And without them, I cannot fly. One of them is yours, of course. The other, well. We’ll get to that.” She shrugged. “And when I have them I can finally go.”

“The house might miss you.”

She blinked, then smiled. “It’ll find someone else. In time.”

Bucky looked out the window again. The trees all looked the same. “Are we heading there now? To the last feather?”

“It’s on the other side of the Forest. It’s going to take a while.” She turned away and went to stand in front of the hearth. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

“I… No. I was thirsty yesterday. But I’m not hungry anymore.”

“It’s the bird’s fire,” she said, looking into it. “It sustains you.”

He walked close to her. She felt him coming and reached behind to grab his hand and bring it around her waist. Her other hand came up, found his hair, pulled him close. She twisted her head back and they kissed slow and wet, and she pushed back against him, grinding, and he grew hard against the small of her back, pressing up against her.

“Hmm,” she smiled, eyes closed. “Might as well kill time.”

Bucky’s hands came up to cover her breasts. They fit just right, and he felt her nipples perk up against his palms. When he rubbed them with his thumbs, she pushed back against him even more, with another hum. “Are you wet?”

The question made him blush; he was, embarrassingly. She must have noticed how he beaded and leaked when he was worked up. She reached behind herself again and slicked him up, pumping her hand up and down. He pressed against her, grabbed harder onto her breasts, pressed kisses against her shoulder, her throat, her jaw.

“Fuck me,” she said—and, as he found the way with his fingers, “not there.”

“What?”

“You’re slick enough now. Go on.”

Bucky felt an inkling of panic when he understood what she meant; but she wanted him to do it, and his entire body loudly approved of her plan, so he lined himself up, pressed up hesitantly. Her ass seemed so tightly closed he would have retreated if she hadn’t exhaled a moan of anticipated pleasure.

He pushed again, and it _was_ much more difficult, so tight he felt he had to force his way in; he ended up doing it by increments, pulling out a few times to slick himself up again. Natasha was holding onto the lintel, facing the hearth, legs spread, feet firmly planted on the floor. Her naked body was glistening with sweat. When finally he managed to thrust all the way inside her, she breathed out _“Yes,”_ and let her head hang forward. “ _Oh_ yes. Are you okay?”

 _You’ll undo me,_ he wanted to say. Her fire was burning right in front of them, a coat of magic. She was the firebird; she had his innocence, several times over now. If he pledged himself to her entirely, would she make him her slave for good? Would he be allowed to stay with her?

“I’m,” he said, then gave up on trying to express how he felt. He reached around her waist, slipped his hand between her thighs and found her wet, pulsing hot. She damn near purred with pleasure when he started stroking and rubbing.

She was still so _tight_ around him. “Does… doesn’t it hurt?”

“Of course it does. Half the fun.” She grinned at him over her shoulder, gleaming with sweat and effort, still holding onto the lintel. “Now move, _okhotnik._ Show me what you do with your prey, yes?”


	5. Chapter 5

# 5.

By the end of the day, the last dregs of Bucky’s virginity had been thoroughly dealt with. He and Natasha napped twined together like cats on the floor in front of the hearth. After a second round, they caught their breath on the bed. They fell off it starting up a third round, yelping and laughing as they grabbed at the covers which ended up falling in a pile over them. It all had stopped being bafflingly wonderful—it had started being wonderfully real instead, Bucky’s good arm falling asleep under Natasha’s weight, her elbow jabbing him in the stomach as she moved, cursing and swearing at each other and laughing, everything too sweaty and hot until it circled right back to good, good, good.

They were resting again now, Natasha sitting up with her knees curled up to her chest in front of the fire, Bucky lying down next to her, rubbing his hand down her back. Looking at her, he kept wondering where she might have come from, if she had not been born a firebird. She had no scars anywhere—and he did mean _anywhere;_ he’d had ample opportunity to check. She spoke the language of tsars, which made sense seeing as they were east of the Volga, and yet she understood his western dialect without trouble. It was as though she came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time; even without her coat of flames, she would have been a mystery.

Bucky had not asked her where she intended to go, after. He already knew he would give her the feather he owned; she needn’t even make it his third task. Which meant he would remain beholden to her indefinitely, just as she’d threatened.

It was a pleasant threat to him now.

But there was also the matter of where _he_ would go when it was over, and he still had no idea what awaited him outside the Forest, try as he might. He knew his hunter’s clothing was important, maybe essential; and yet he wore it with no pleasure, only obligation. The red star on his shoulder rang no bells. But he remembered the way the Forest had tried to waylay him on his first day: a voice calling to him, begging for help, sobbing with fear. His sister? No, a boy’s voice. Lying there on the floor of the little house, Bucky tried to picture him and couldn’t. Yet it was this illusion something had used to bait him. Was it completely untrue? A mere fantasy?

Movement drew his attention, and he strained up to see what Natasha was doing. She had her coat of flames spread out in her lap, sewing the angel-given feather back into place. He started rubbing her back again, up from down, fingertips trailing on her skin.

“The second task you have for me,” he said to the ceiling. “The place we’re going now. Is it the memories?”

She stopped sewing. “The memories?”

“I…” He felt suddenly wary. “When I was lost, before you found me, I heard—something evil, I think. It was trying to draw me away from the path I was on. It was calling to me, saying I had to come and save someone’s life. A friend, I think. I don’t know.”

Natasha’s back tightened under his hand; he felt the muscles coiling. “It’s the hydra.”

“The hydra? Isn’t that a sort of dragon from the southern marches?”

“Not the one in our Forest.” The way she said _our,_ Bucky understood she meant everything in the North, from his green country to her immensity of black pines. “Nobody’s ever seen it. But we know it’s a hydra because it has a lot of heads. And if you try to face one, another will get you from the back.”

Bucky pressed his hand flat onto her side. “That’s why you need a partner again. Someone to watch your back.”

“Never thought I would trust a hunter for it.”

He could hear the wryness in her voice, and rubbed his thumb over her skin. “How about a lover?”

She turned so he could actually see her smile. Then, tucking a lock of hair over her ear, she bent down to kiss him. In that moment, with her soft skin under his fingers, the warmth of the flames over his bare body, Bucky was more tempted than ever to stay in. Forever. Let the house walk the earth for them, and curl up within, sheltered from the world.

*

Bucky pulled on his black clothes and considered the red star on his shoulder. Part of him was almost eager to go and face the hydra that hid in the dark core of the Forest. It was a way to remember. And if he could remember why he had come here, he could finally make a decision; hopefully one that would allow him to stay.

Natasha, for her part, was being very overtly nonchalant, which—Bucky remembered from the angels’ ball—meant she was actually quite nervous. He watched her pull out the coat of flames from the hearth and shake it out in front of her. The flames seemed to lick every inch of the little room, fiery wings spreading at Natasha’s feet.

She pulled on the massive trailing wing-sleeves, buttoned up the tight feather-front, and pulled on the bird-hood; as she did, the entire coat melted into her skin—leaving her naked again, but with a glow coming from her bones beneath the skin for a moment. From the second she had pulled the coat from the hearth, the house had begun to slow down; and now that the flames had sunk into her body, the house came to a halt, step after step, until it leaned down and sat in the pine needles.

“Can’t you change your shape entirely?” Bucky asked.

“With two feathers missing? Improperly.” She was putting on human clothing now, the outfit that was similar to his own, down to the red star. The sleeves were too long for her, but she pulled them tight around her wrists using her golden clothing fixtures. He knew she had a knife strapped to her thigh, too.

Bucky let her finish and went to the cabin’s entrance, grabbing his crossbow as he went. When he pulled the door open, he stopped.

There was nothing beyond. Just darkness so thick it felt like being blind. Bucky looked up, trying to find the night sky, but there was nothing, nothing.

Natasha came up behind him and simply said, “Yes.”

Bucky glanced at her. Without the hearth’s warmth, the only light that was left came from her face, a soft red-gold glow. She grabbed his hand, the metal one, and squeezed it as if to remind them both he had been hurt before, and might get hurt again.

“We can’t get separated,” she said. “The hydra preys on our memories. As long as we’re together, it will be weakened, not knowing on which of us to draw.” She let go of Bucky’s silver hand. “Except for the bad memories we have in common.”

“I liked the angels’ ball,” Bucky said softly.

“You lost your _arm_ there.”

“And then you saved me.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Let’s go, Nastka. There is a feather of yours waiting.”

Natasha shot him a look, but it was mostly fond. She stepped out into the darkness with him, closing the door behind them. Bucky spared a last regretful thought for the warm, cozy bed, the house which would have liked nothing more than to carry them away from this shadowy den. Then he looked ahead into the dark and asked the crucial question.

“How do we kill it?”

“I have no idea,” Natasha said lightly. She exhaled. “Aim for the right head, I suppose.”

They stepped off, not holding hands, but brushing shoulders.

*

It was not just dark. It was also silent, even though streams were running through the pine needles. This tugged at something in Bucky’s memory—the water’s silence, when had he witnessed it?—but he pushed the déjà vu away. It was probably better not to bait the creature, for all that they were trying to find it.

His heart was beating strong against his ribs. Despite himself, he was on the lookout for the boy’s cries for help again. If he could just remember who he was, why he was in danger; if he could find out…

“ _What are you doing still out?_ ” said a loud voice very close to his ear.

Bucky whipped round, aiming his crossbow.

“Your chores,” boomed the voice. “Your _chores._ How many times do I have to fucking _say it?”_

He couldn’t see a thing. “Natasha,” he said, “I think—”

But when he turned round, she wasn’t there. Straining, he heard her in the distance swearing between her teeth. _“Bucky, where the hell have you gone? For goodness’ sake, rule one…”_

How and when had he wandered away from her? One step, maybe, was all it had taken—it was all this solid darkness needed to brick a wall between them. Bucky turned his back on the voice and headed for Natasha. “Nat—I’m here—”

He reached for her, felt fabric shift under his hand, grabbed her fast just as someone grabbed him, too—by the hair, slamming his head into a hardwood doorframe. Bucky felt his forehead split; the darkness suddenly filled with stars.

“Does that get it through your thick fucking head? Huh? You,” _slam!_ “don’t,” _slam!_ “wander,” _slam!_ “off.”

“Pa,” Bucky heard himself plead. His voice had changed, changed into a teenage boy’s high-pitched tremor. “Pa, please, I didn’t mean—”

A last heavy slam against the wood; then big hands pulled at his shirt, ripped it in half along the seam he had only just sewn back the week before. Half-blind with pain, he reached with his right hand, found the doorframe he had been beaten against and hung onto it. He heard the noise of an unbuckling belt, the whizz of it coming loose.

“Pa, please,” he uttered, and then the belt was coming down onto his back. He bit down a sob, brought his head down and gritted his teeth. The metal buckle was cutting into his sides; the hard leather felt like it would strip all the flesh from his ribs. Warm blood started trickling down, the same blood that was flowing from the cut on his forehead. He should have been light-headed but remained all too lucid, defenseless before the pain that flared white-hot through him with every strike.

“Please, no more,” he wailed, “Pa, please, I’m sorry, please, no more!”

But his father did not stop, beat him again and again, and Bucky thought he really would kill him this time, only if he did he wouldn’t have anybody to do his chores for him. He scrabbled at the door, pulled at the cloth in his other hand. What was this cloth?

What was this hand?

Something was wrong with his arm. When he looked at it, he found it perfectly normal, though his vision was blurred with red pain. And at the same time he was conscious of not seeing anything at all, like a man dreaming and trying to open his eyes. He firmed his grip on this other reality—the blows on his back and sides still hurt like the devil, but they also felt wrong, distant, a product of his mind only, just like the blood dripping out of his wounds, just like the wounds itself. His father was raging, trying to pull him back into the nightmare, but Bucky was small there, defenseless. He could not beat his father; he had never been able to beat his father. All he could do was run away.

So he pushed up to his feet and pulled hard at the cloth in his hand—so hard the entire world _swiveled_ like a secret door and he was slammed right into a sunlit clearing.

*

“Today is the day,” said a man to him in the tsar’s tongue.

The man was wearing a red robe and a great white smile. Bucky straightened up, blinking and dazed. This was not the Forest; the pines were much shorter, and light brown or green rather than deep black. A handful of people in red clothing were walking towards a red yurt and throwing its curtains open.

“Today’s the day!” It was a woman this time, speaking in Bucky’s peasant tongue. Another person repeated the same words, presumably, in a third language; then again and again.

Inside the yurt were a small crowd of little girls. Twenty-eight, to be exact. They all looked different—brown-skinned and light-haired and dark-eyed and freckled. They all looked around the same age.

“Natalia,” the red man said. “Natalia, you are the one.”

A little girl, very pale and with very red hair, slowly stood from the circle. “I am the one?”

“Yes. You are the one through whom the firebird comes. Come out! Come out!”

Looking flustered but pleased, the small girl—how old could she be? No more than ten—carefully picked her way past her sisters to get out of the yurt. The red-robed man set her in front of him and put his hands on her shoulders, as if to ground her.

“Close the curtains!” he called out.

His comrades obeyed, sealing the yurt in heavy leather. Before they tied up the curtains properly, another girl piped up from the inside. “What about the rest of us?”

“You will go back to your parents,” the red-robed man said.

“But Master Lukin, sir,” the girl said. “It has been so long! How will we recognize them?”

“All recognize their kin,” Lukin answered, “in the heavens.”

And then his men set fire to the yurt.

At this point, Bucky was on the other side of the clearing, not daring to interfere since these people could clearly see and hear him, though they didn’t seem to notice him much. But when he saw the flames catch onto the dry bushes around the yurt—when he understood the entire construction had been _built to be set aflame_ —he shouted and took off running. But it was too late; within seconds, the fire had built up to a roaring blaze, drowning out even the cries of the little girls inside.

Natasha was screaming, straining against the hands holding her. But she was just a little girl; what could she do? Just like Bucky, in his own nightmare, was just a young boy; what could he do?

“Now,” said Lukin. “Natalia. Now that we are calling the firebird with fire and blood. Now that we have ensured it will come. We have to make you worthy of wearing its coat.”

There was something in the middle of the clearing—a wooden table, with leather straps, with blades shining in the sun. Lukin started dragging Natasha towards it, holding her thin wrists at her back. “You have to see death, little girl,” he was saying, “to be worthy of being reborn.”

Bucky realized he was not all the way across the clearing like he had thought. This was Natasha: he had found her in the dark. He was holding her sleeve. He was next to her. She looked at him, tears streaming down her face ruined with grief.

Lukin looked at him too. “Who are _you?”_

“You wanted a firebird,” Bucky said. He was breathless with horror and hatred. “Well. I’m the one who hunts them.”

And he shot a crossbow bolt right through Lukin’s head.

The other red-robed people cried out and dropped what they were doing to come to him. Bucky pushed Natasha away. He was not afraid; these people were rich and soft, wrapped in their thick velvet and plush silk, able only to torture little girls. Bucky, on this side of the nightmare, was a man—a tough farmer’s son who had shouldered abuse for years, grown large enough in frame to shoulder it whole, and with a silver arm now glinting in the sun, and a crossbow clinking in his hands.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, his father was still raging, pulling at him, trying to make him turn around and face the other hydra’s head—the one that had been grown specifically to prey on him.

“It is like you said,” he told Natasha. “We have to aim for the right head.”

She looked at him, and he knew she was herself beneath the child’s façade, just as he had been himself too. He gave her his hand. “Switch? My own nightmare’s nothing next to this, I promise.”

She bared her teeth and grabbed his hand and _pulled._

With her safely expelled out of the dream, there was nothing left to hinder Bucky. The red-robed people were on him, so he slung his crossbow across his back and grabbed one of the glinting knives on the table instead. He was glad the dream had not reached its end; he was glad he had not seen what they wanted to do—had done—to Natasha, to make her _worthy_ of rebirth.

Bucky was a hunter. He did not like to make living beings suffer, but he had grappled with enraged deer and struggling hares. He had survived his father’s blows. He had pain and fighting anchored deep in his bones, every time they had broken and set again. The next minutes were a blur of blood, cutting open throat and bellies, red velvet stained with red flesh. As he stabbed and ripped and gouged, he felt something else threaten to rip—the fabric of the world around him, exactly like the angels’ palace had burned off wholesale under Natasha’s fire.

He kept going, picking up his crossbow again to shoot the ones trying to flee, flinging his knife between a woman’s shoulder blades. His black clothes did not show the blood, but they were dripping with it; on his shoulder, the star had grown a deeper, richer red.

Suddenly—it was like everything around him had fallen down a well. He saw it fold away, light and trees and corpses, and shoot off into obscurity. On instinct, he turned around—knowing the only danger left came from his own mind now.

But the darkness behind him was being ripped apart, too. There was an immense creature burning with fire in front of him, maybe seven feet tall. Feathers spiked up its arms like battle wings, all ablaze; its hands were bird talons, scaly and sharp. Its eyes were bird eyes, black and beady; but its face was Natasha’s. And she was tearing Bucky’s father to _pieces._

He was pleading, like his teenage son before him; scrambling and crying and bleeding. But Natasha kept going, savaging him with great slashes of her claws, her face a mask of rage and hatred. Bucky must have looked the same killing the red-robed men.

He felt tears rolling down his cheeks, clearing a path through the blood. He put his hands over his face. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

His real father, he knew, somewhere outside the Forest, was not dead. And the people Bucky had killed weren’t dead either. But standing there, he _felt_ Natasha destroy the pain that lived inside his memory, gutting it and shredding it into thinner and thinner pieces. And he hoped his own rampage had felt just as good to her.

“Thank you,” he said as Natasha attacked the very fabric of his nightmare, like he had attacked hers. “Thank you. Thank you.”

And on her last blow, it happened again: the vision of blood and death was swallowed away as if falling down a horizontal pit, and this time it tore away the entire veil of darkness. Next thing they knew, they were standing in the middle of the forest, breathing hard. The obscurity around them was a normal one, bathed by moonlight.

Tears were streaming down Natasha’s face, too. She turned to Bucky, catching her breath. “Thank you.”

More hot tears welled up in his eyes. He shook his head mutely, unable to form words, and she went to him and pulled him close and wrapped her arms around him; and he held her just as tight, even when he felt her hands—still bird talons—sinking into his waist.

“Natasha,” he said, over and over again. “Nastka, Natasha,” and he heard her say his name in return.

They didn’t part before they were both done crying. When they did, sniffing and wiping tears, the silver moonlight had a challenger: a flaming feather was slowly spinning over their heads, projecting a warm glow over the trees.

*

“Won’t you miss your house?” Bucky asked.

“It was never mine,” Natasha said, helping him lift the straw mattress off the bed.

They carried it outside and folded it over a low pine branch. Bucky remembered a time, not too long ago, where the trees stretched so far up he would have had to climb for hours to reach even their lowest branches. But ever since the night before, the Forest had lost much of its darkness. Sun streamed down to the floor again, gently warming their aching limbs.

Natasha had slipped the poker from the hearth into her belt. She took it out and started beating the mattress, which sneezed out huge clouds of dust with every blow.

“Can you bring out all the furniture?” she asked. “Remember how it’s fitted around the room—we’ll have to put it back just the way it was.”

Bucky spent the next ten minutes carrying out chairs and cabinets and finally, the bed frame. His silver arm, which didn’t strain or get tired, was a lot of help. He wondered how people would react to it outside. Maybe he’d better hide it.

After leaving the hydra’s place, the house had brought them back to the little pond Natasha liked. When he was done carrying all the linens out, Natasha put them in a pile and brought them over a rock to wash them. Bucky found a bucket amidst the house’s things and went to fill it with water; then he grabbed a broom too, went back inside the house, opened all the windows and started sweeping. Soon he was producing about as much dust as Natasha had beating the mattress.

“Need a hand?” she yelled.

“If you’re done,” he called back, which surprised him. Asking for help with chores didn’t feel natural; and yet minutes later, Natasha came into the house, armed with a big fluffy pine branch to help him sweep.

She grinned and said, “Don’t you feel too hot?” and he realized he did, and took off his shirt.

Sweeping and dusting the little house from top to bottom took them almost two hours. The mattress outside was basking in the sun. After a little while, Natasha peeled off her own shirt and tied a scarf around her breasts. She pulled her hair into a bun, and Bucky did the same. He didn’t like chores, but doing them with someone else—and doing them as thanks to the house—felt good. Almost fun.

While he finished rubbing dirt off the beams, standing on a chair, Natasha scraped resin from the trees around the clearing and crushed it into a powder which she sprinkled into the bucket of water. When they were both done, she splashed the floors with it, and they both scrubbed until everything was gleaming.

By the time they were finished, the entire house was pristine and smelling like fresh pine. The linens had dried, the mattress was dust-free and sun-warmed. They brought back the furniture into the house, piece by piece, interlocking them again around the room; then they made the bed again, and they were done.

Even without the coat of flames powering it, the house felt alive, cheerful, like it wanted to thank them.

“I’m so grubby,” Natasha said, wiping sweat off her forehead. “I need a bath.”

Bucky grabbed her from behind and pulled her close against him to kiss her neck. “You’re fine to me.”

Natasha squeaked with disgust. “You’re even worse. Get off—” But when he did, she drew him close again to kiss him, and smiled against his mouth. They weren’t long to throw off all their clothes and run into the water, laughing and splashing each other.

The sun made them warm and languid; the pond was perfect. Bucky floated on his back for a while, looking at the sky. He felt he hadn’t seen it in months.

“Is the hydra dead?” he asked.

“No,” Natasha said. She was sitting in shallow water lapping her waist, resting back against the rocks. “We only took down two of its heads. It will grow more. But we gave it a good scare.”

“And the angels?”

“They’re still here, too. They will keep luring travelers. You have to understand,” she said, stretching, “that the only thing wrong with the Forest is me.”

Bucky stopped floating, straightening up to watch her, treading water. “You?”

“The feathers gave dark things too much power. But now we have them back. This place can be balanced again.”

There was a silence.

“Do you want your feather back?” Bucky said. “I’ll give it to you now. You don’t have to make me.”

Natasha smiled sadly. “I know.”

“But…?”

“You know how I got to wear the firebird’s coat. You saw my memories.”

“Yes. You…” He hesitated. “You already remembered, didn’t you?”

“I tried to fight the hydra on my own many times before. So yes, I retrieved that memory a long time ago. It’s the one it used most often.” She shrugged. “They raised me and groomed me to wear it. And I can do amazing things with it. But I wish I had never gotten it.”

“If I could only take it from you. That would solve both our problems.”

“No,” she said softly, looking at him. “I would not wish that on you.”

He remembered the knives laid out on the table, in the clearing, in the nightmare. He had saved her from it and killed her captors. But in memory only. In real life they had done this to her, and no one had been there to help.

The gentle lapping of the water was the only thing that troubled the silence for a while. Then Natasha stretched and said, “We should go.”

“Will you know the way?”

“The house will.”

“Natasha,” Bucky said as she rose. “When we’re out, it doesn’t matter what comes back to me. I’ll stand by you. You know I will.”

She gave him a half-smile. Her pale nudity in the warm sunlight, the translucent water, the tender green background—it all made her look like a fairy rather than a creature of blood and pain and fire. He thought of their first time bathing in the pond, how he’d barely been able to look at her then.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said.

Bucky always stopped talking when he was told. But as he walked out of the water too, he felt his resolve intact in his chest, beating like a drum. Whatever he had come here for, riches, fame, favors, it could never compare to what he had found. Someone he wanted; someone who wanted him—how could he even dream of throwing that away? His dearest wish, ever since he had first danced with her, had been to stay with her forever.

He grabbed at the red star on his shoulder and pulled hard, snapping the seams, until he ripped it off altogether. _I renounce you,_ he thought at whoever waited for him outside. _I renounce you._

__


	6. Chapter 6

# 6.

“Here we are,” Natasha said, snapping the thread.

She had sewn back the last two feathers into her wing—the one the hydra had abandoned as it ran, and the one Bucky had freely given back to her. Now the coat in the hearth seemed to glow like a pile of jewels. Bucky was standing at one of the two small windows, gazing outside. He saw stronger daylight filtering ahead.

“The tree line. I think it’s the tree line. I can see…” There was a river, noiseless, smooth as glass. “I can _almost_ remember its name… I think it’s all starting to come back.”

Just as he said so, the house stopped with what felt like a definite step. Bucky and Natasha exchanged a puzzled look. They waited, looking up at the beams as if an answer might write itself across the ceiling, but the house didn’t communicate anything except a firm decision not to move anymore.

“Maybe it doesn’t want to leave the Forest,” Bucky suggested.

“Maybe.” Natasha patted the floor. “Come on, honey.”

“It’s fine. We can finish on foot.”

Natasha nodded and pulled the coat of flames from the hearth, draping it around herself. It slowly sank into her skin, making no change to her appearance. The house was stock still; it was not sitting down into the forest floor. They exchanged another confused look.

Bucky opened the front door and gauged the distance separating them from the ground. “It’s not that high,” he said like a question. In truth he was sure he’d break his ankle jumping down.

“I can fly down,” Natasha offered. “When I’m on the ground, I’ll raise my hands. You can put your feet in them and break your fall that way.”

Bucky knew she was strong enough for it to work. And besides, their only other option was to fashion a rope from the bed sheets, something that felt sacrilegious after the house had done so much for them.

“Let’s try that.” He slipped his crossbow into the straps of his bag, then threw the whole thing down; it bounced off the ground with a heavy clinking noise and rolled away a few feet in the dirt. “All right. Ready?”

She grinned, and _changed._

Bucky had seen her turn into a half-bird thing before; he had seen her with wings at her back like an angel of fire, and seen her with beady bird eyes and talons for hands. But this time she changed entirely, and he had never seen a bird like her.

She was huge, for starters—must keep the same weight as her human form—with dark eyes ringed as if with kohl, and a flurry of feathers crowning her head, and a luxuriant tail fanning out behind her, nearly filling the room. And of course, every single one of her feathers was a burning flame.

She felt so warm, so benevolent, that Bucky walked closer in fascination. She went still, as if afraid. Maybe she had feared him seeing her like this, so blatantly inhuman.

He put his arms around her and pressed his face into her plumage. She didn’t push him back, even partially took his body under her wing, and pressed her beautiful crowned head to his, closing her black jewel eyes.

“Whatever I remember out there, nothing’s going to change,” Bucky said, clutching her close. “Do you know that? I’ll never hurt you. And—and I’ll be honored to be by your side for as long as you’ll let me.”

It was easier saying those words when she didn’t have a human face for him to read. She pulled back from him in a rustle of feathers and snapped her beak affectionately—it was long and profiled like a swan’s—as if to say he was getting too emotional. Then she jumped to the threshold and from there out into the air.

Bucky rushed behind her to see her fly, but she had simply flapped down to the ground. All the same, her majestic trailing tail and her graceful curving neck were a sight to see. Sitting there on the grey-brown forest floor, she looked like a glowing coal in an ashy hearth. She looked up at him, cocked her head to the side, and winked.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, trying for nonchalance despite his pounding heart. “Change back already. I want to get down.”

Which was when the silver net flew through the air.

Natasha cried a horrible cry when it wrapped around her; she tried to flap free, but it was too late—the strands were strangling every part of her body as if alive, and they were weighted enough to pin her to the ground. Bucky looked around wildly and saw three men coming out of the trees, stumbling in their excitement.

“Leave her alone!” he shouted. “Get back!”

One of the breathless men looked up at him, perched up in a Baba Yaga’s house, and scrunched up his face. “You’re alive? What the hell happened to you, Stodołny?”

His true name pierced Bucky like an arrow; he wavered on the doorstep. Just then, he also realized these men were wearing the same clothes he was—black with a red star on the shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he asked, heart hammering with fear. “Who are you?”

“Damn,” said another of the men. Seeing that the firebird had stopped struggling for now, breathing quick and hard like a trapped bird indeed, they had gathered next to their leader to stare up at Bucky. “He got all witched up. Sounds like he doesn’t even remember us.”

“You all shouldn’t remember anything either!” Bucky protested. “How…” That was when he saw the silver amulets each of them was wearing around their neck. He looked to the silver net again and suddenly felt a great, throbbing ache in his left arm.

“Pretty, huh?” The leader waved his amulet at him. “They just fell out of a tree for us. Along with that nice little net. We hesitated a lot—it did look like a trap—but then somehow we stopped being afraid, and what a good thing that was. Turns out someone in the Forest really wanted to help us.”

The angels, of course the angels. And the hydra, enticing these men with sweet memories until they forgot the danger of using magic. Natasha had defied them too much; they had teamed up against her. And so the hunters had walked the Forest without forgetting why they were there, without getting devoured or plagued with their worst nightmares, armed with enough pure silver to defeat even Natasha’s power in full force.

“Please, you can’t do that to her,” Bucky begged. “Please. She’s not an animal. She’s a person. Let her go, if we were ever friends—let her go.”

“That’s very touching,” the leader said. He walked over to Natasha and lifted her off the ground, using the net like a potato sack; she cried out and twisted again, trying not to hurt herself. “But I’m sorry to say we were never friends, little Jakub.”

The other men looked up at Bucky. “What should we do with him?”

“He’s as good as dead,” the leader said. “And it’s less work to leave him up there. So—goodbye, Stodołny.”

His men laughed, and they just started to walk away, carrying Natasha who was crying out again and again, occasionally struggling against the net in a flurry of powerless flames. Bucky just watched them go and cursed himself for throwing down his crossbow.

He had to jump. He just had to jump. But when he looked at how far the ground was, he knew he couldn’t do it without hurting himself. And the men were so far away already he couldn’t ever hope to catch them on a broken leg. He let out a sound of frustrated rage and went back into the house.

“Bring me down!” he yelled. “Bring me down! What does it take for you to move? Are you not magic yourself? Bring me down!”

The house stayed so still it could have passed for a completely normal wooden shack if it hadn’t been still perched on bird legs. Bucky tried not to beat at the walls; it would have been useless, and it probably wasn’t the house’s fault if it couldn’t move. From the beginning, it had needed Natasha’s magic to go around.

And yet Natasha had told Bucky that when she had crashed into the Forest, alone and wounded, the house had come to her. Had she been lying to him?

Maybe it had been drawn to Natasha—to someone who could inhabit it again. Maybe that was why it had stopped at the edge of the Forest and not sat down to let them go; it didn’t want Natasha to leave. Natasha had magic; she was worthy of living in a witch’s house, and Bucky was not.

“What can I give you?” Bucky begged. “I don’t have my feather anymore. I gave it back to her. Please, I’m not asking you to move me around. Please, just bring me down, let me go to her.”

But why would it listen to him? He was a hunter like these men were; he had obviously been on their team, they knew his name and wore the same clothes he did. As far as the house was concerned, he was there to take its darling Natasha away, too; hell, on the day they met, it had tried to kill him, pursuing him with giant bird talons until Natasha put a stop to it.

“I’m not her enemy—I’m pledged to her!” Bucky said suddenly. “You know I am.”

The house shivered, which filled him with hope. It was listening. It _was_ able to move on its own. But as far as it was concerned, it was fostering an enemy betwixt its walls.

Bucky almost threatened to start behaving like one. Wreck the place, tear out the floorboards, shred the sheets into a rope after all if the house wouldn’t help him get down to the ground. But he didn’t want to be like his father, reigning through terror and force. He wanted so badly to keep what he had found to love.

And then the solution came to him.

“I pledge myself to _you,”_ he said. “My name is Jakub Stodołny and I pledge myself to you for life.”

For a moment after that, there was nothing; only a great wooden stillness.

But then the house creaked down, slowly, slowly, the floor sloping under Bucky’s feet, one way and then the other again, making him stumble and lose his balance yet again—he still wasn’t in the habit of this—until he felt the familiar thud that meant the house had folded its bird legs completely under itself and met the ground.

“Thank you,” Bucky breathed. He got back up. “Thank you. I won’t disappoint you.”

He stepped out of the house and looked around for his pack which he had so stupidly thrown away. For a few excruciating seconds he simply didn’t find it; and then a ray of sun caught on the glinting crossbow, and all his breath left his lungs in relief. He hurried over to it and took only the crossbow and the bolts—he wouldn’t need anything else if he didn’t manage to make use of that.

Then he turned towards the edge of the Forest and ran.

*

He didn’t know any of the men’s names, so when he saw them he just shouted, “ _Stop!”_ as loud as he knew how—and his throat hurt like he had never really raised his voice before. They were carrying Natasha in her net between them; when they heard Bucky, they put her down and turned around, hands going to their weapons.

Bucky was quicker; he raised his crossbow and took aim at the leader’s head. “Let her go,” he said. He was breathless, but calm. “I have a feeling I can use this thing very well.”

“Yeah, you can, pretty boy. I remember you shooting squirrels so small I couldn’t even see them.” Despite this acknowledgment, the leader didn’t seem worried. “Do you really not remember me? I’m Brókk.”

“I don’t want to remember you,” Bucky said without lowering his crossbow.

“And I almost don’t want to hurt you. Hell, this is just sad. You’re caught so deep in that spell you don’t even know it.”

“I’m not under a spell.”

All the other men laughed. Brókk gave a casual kick to Natasha’s huddled form in the net. “No? You promised to bring back the firebird. _Whatever it takes._ Don’t you want to know why?”

“I don’t want _you_ to tell me why.” Bucky was prepared to shoot. “Enough talking. Do as I say.”

“That’s a nice arm you got there,” Brókk said. “Shiny.”

And suddenly the great ache Bucky had felt earlier started again, but this time it didn’t let up. Ice shot up into his chest, his heart; it strangled his throat and his stomach, shriveled him inside like a plant in winter. His body arched up like a sail nearly snapping under a sudden wind. He threw his crossbow away despite himself, then keeled over completely on the forest floor, spasming, choking on nothing.

In the distance he heard Natasha keen and rage, struggling under the net—but the net was vicious, vengeful magic woven especially for her, and it was made of the same stuff as Bucky’s arm, just like the amulets Brókk and his men were wearing.

“Hurts, huh? We _just_ had a vision we might use those shiny baubles like this on you. There’s weird shit happening in these woods, I’m telling ya.” Another harsh pang of agony. “But seems like it’s on our side, so I ain’t complaining.”

It hurt so bad Bucky almost couldn’t think; he had never felt a pain like this, quick and arcing like a million ants were running under his skin, his muscles convulsing of their own accord. It felt like it was frying his mind; all his thoughts were disjointed, frantic, running in little individual circles. Suddenly, it let up, and he slumped in the dirt, eyes wide open and filling with tears, panting. He was ashamed to discover his gasping for air was quickly turning into sobs.

“Look, Stodołny. Here’s the deal. Come along out of the Forest. That way you’ll remember why you came with us—and we probably can’t use our amulets on you out there. Clean slate, of sorts. If you still want to fight then, we can have it out.”

Bucky had to pry his jaws open to speak. “N-no d-deal.”

Brókk snorted. “You’re a stubborn piece of shit, aren’t you? That felt like a damn reasonable offer to me.”

And it was. Part of Bucky knew what he must look like to these men who’d obviously come here with him, as a team—maybe even as _his_ team, though they didn’t seem too moved by his turning against them. If it had been him, he would have probably tried to reason with them, too, enticed them to come out of the Forest so things could be like before.

But Bucky desperately needed _not_ to come out of it. He couldn’t take the risk of becoming Natasha’s enemy, for any reason. He kept thinking about the table of rough wood in the middle of the clearing—the table, and the knives on it, and the little girl the red-robed people were dragging there. She had been taken; she had been _raised_ for this, to be tortured and killed. An easy sacrifice for these men, if it brought them the power they craved.

Bucky couldn’t add himself to the list of people who had failed her.

“Last chance before I fry you to death, Stodołny,” Brókk said.

In the net, Natasha had turned back into a woman. None of the men had noticed; they were all looking at Bucky slumped in the dirt. But he saw her and thought she was even more beautiful that way, when she wasn’t ringed with flames.

She held his gaze. Her hand was small enough to reach through the silver mesh. And Bucky’s crossbow had landed next to her when he’d thrown it away in his spasms.

“No deal,” Bucky said again—and Natasha fired the crossbow.

The bolt embedded itself in Brókk’s calf; he let out a yell of agony and fell to one knee. With an animal effort, Bucky pushed to his feet and slammed into him; his silver hand found the silver amulet and ripped it off his neck. The other men fumbled with theirs in a panic—they hadn’t expected to have to use them, not when Brókk had it all under control—and Bucky had no problem tearing the silver baubles off their collars too, throwing them away in the pine needles, striding to Natasha and tugging the net open.

“Go,” he gasped, “just go—” and she turned into a firebird again, radiant like the sun; but as she spread her wings and took off, a crossbow bolt flew through the air and embedded itself in her chest.

Her great cry echoed Bucky’s—and also the shout of Brókk’s men. “ _No!”_

Keening and crying, bleeding ichor in fat golden drops, she flew erratically up to the first pine branches and rested there, clinging to the bark. And maybe some of the Forest’s inhabitants hated her, but the Forest itself didn’t, because the pines were very dark and very tall all of a sudden, too tall for anyone to shoot her again. The branches were so thick they hid her from sight, clothed her in pine needles.

“Nastka!” Bucky called. “ _Natasha!_ ”

“What the fuck did you do?” yelled one of Brókk’s men.

Scowling, Brókk pulled the bolt out of his calf and threw aside the crossbow he’d used. His hands were stained with blood, his brow stained with sweat. “It was going to burn us all to death, you great fucking fools.”

“But it might be dead!”

“Yeah. And so what? You know the rule. If it escapes just fucking shoot it. Like Pierce did all these years ago. Better than have someone else capture it. And besides, we weren’t tasked with bringing it back. _He_ was.” He had the silver amulet in his hand.

He met Bucky’s gaze before he used it, making his legs give out under him again. This time, he didn’t let up for minutes on end, and Bucky screamed and screamed himself raw. When it was over, he just stayed there, shaking and unable to control his limbs. He had lost control of his body entirely; a patch of urine stained the ground underneath him.

“He failed, we’re bringing him back to face the consequences, and that’s all anyone needs to know.”

The men had picked up their amulets too; what Rumlow was saying seemed to cotton on. They looked at each other; then one shrugged and the other two nodded. There was nothing else to do.

“Tie him up,” Brókk said, bandaging his calf. “And then let’s leave this godforsaken place.”

*

Bucky hadn’t seen the unshaded sun in what felt like months. Maybe it _was_ months—it was cold when they came out, and the few deciduous trees growing along the river had red-brown leaves. Brókk and the others had tortured him repeatedly on their way out of the Forest; he wasn’t trying to escape or fight back anymore, only letting them drag him out, his eyes glazed and unseeing, his legs unable to support his weight.

He was trying not to think of Natasha, of whether she was dead. She had to be fine; firebird feathers had such a strong healing power. But could they heal the one who carried them? Bucky didn’t know how it worked, and he was exhausted with pain and misery. When he saw the iron wire cage and understood they meant to put him in it, he felt only relief; at least he wouldn’t have to walk.

The amulets turned out to still work outside the Forest after all, which made sense since his arm still moved, too. With quick sharp bursts of pain, they made him crawl into the cage. Then they lifted it up, the four of them—Brókk’s wound must not be that deep, if he could still walk—and set off.

Bucky’s eyes wandered over the silent river. He closed them and stayed limp as they carried him across, moving from stones to stones without care, jostling him against the sharp wire. When they got to the other side, the silence broke away; the waterfall rush of the Volga filled his ears and his mind.

His eyes reopened wide to look at the autumn sky.

 _“Steve,”_ he whispered.


	7. Chapter 7

# 7.

His name was Jakub Stodołny, and he had come out of the Forest a cursed man.

The return trip was agony. This time, they didn’t walk, just bought a mule-drawn cart outright—meaning they had had the money all along, saving it without telling him—and loaded up the cage on it. It was too small for his body, so he had to stay curled up and couldn’t move around. Brókk and his men were taking no chances; they used their amulets to incapacitate him before they let him out to eat or relieve himself. Then after the first week, they didn’t let him out at all anymore, just fed him through the mesh and let him soil himself. When he started stinking too much, they simply dipped the cage in the Volga running alongside the road. By the end of the second week he was shivering constantly.

They needn’t be so careful. Even if they had let him free, he wouldn’t have tried to escape.

Autumn leaves were falling from the trees, crackling under the mule’s hooves. Bucky looked at them through the mesh of his cage, jostled by the bumping cart, his eyes blurry with pain, and begged the weather to stay mild and not freeze Steve to death in the darkness of his cell. If the snow came early, if the wind turned… But no. Steve would get out of there, he could go back to the village, to his neighbor Gosia who would take care of him, heal his grief, marry him, maybe, and make a family with him. He could yet live. He had so much to live for.

Whereas Bucky should never have been born. He had killed his mother the second he came into this world—his father had gone mad with rage, his sister had been quick to leave this noxious household, married at seventeen when Bucky was only six years old, and from then on he had been alone. Why should he not die? His father’s pain would be soothed, his sister could return to visit him, their family would be one again. Steve would be safe, life would go on. If Bucky only died, the world would be right again.

Except that wasn’t true, because his death would do nothing to help Natasha, and he couldn’t think about her without feeling like he’d been run through with a rusty blade. Was she all right? Was she alive? Was she even real? Now that he was back in the mortal world, he felt like everything in the Forest must have been a dream. The silver angels and the shadow hydra, the great bright fire, the endless trees, the walking house—all those were nothing next to Natasha, Natasha, who had smiled at him.

When he tried to remember their entangled bodies, her breathlessness, the taste of her skin, he found himself weeping because it didn’t feel real anymore. Something so good couldn’t have possibly happened to _him_.

Now he had woken up from this fantasy, and everything around him was cold and grey and utterly devoid of magic. All he had left for proof was his silver arm, drawing pain to him like a lightning rod. When they tied him to the stake, this metal limb was probably the only thing that would survive the fire; it would end up as a curiosity to frighten children, preserved in a glass case somewhere in the Ducal House, without even his name on it. Another fool who went off to hunt firebirds and found only his doom.

*

The brutal shock of the cage being dropped to the ground snapped him out of his fitful doze. He groaned with pain when he was pulled out of his narrow prison; only two weeks in there and he already felt like his body could never unfold completely again.

“Take off his clothes,” Brókk said. “Bind his hands.”

Bucky flinched when they tugged down his pants and pulled off his shirt, when he felt the cold air on his bare body, but didn’t resist, just stayed limp and let them do what they wanted, keeping his mouth shut. How quickly he had gone back to his reflexes of old, the ones he maintained in his father’s house.

They pulled his mismatched wrists to his back and tied them together, flesh against silver; then a burst of pain made him spasm and clench his teeth.

“Up,” Brókk ordered. “Into the river.” His voice clearly said he’d hurt Bucky again if he didn’t comply.

They were washing him. Without his clothes this time. This must mean they were close to the Ducal House. With a grimace, Bucky managed to unfold his aching limbs and get up, wobbly like a fawn; the threat of more agony was a powerful motivator. The green Elbe was right there, sweeping along dead leaves in droves.

Bucky stumbled forward into the icy, murky waters, lost his footing and fell down. Brókk and his men laughed at him, but no matter how cold, it felt good to be clean again for the first time in two weeks. He dipped his head under the surface for a second, then just sat there with his head bowed, letting his long hair trickle around his face and simply breathing behind this meager curtain, looking at the drops fall into the water.

It occurred to him this might be his last moment of peace before death.

He was very afraid. To be burned alive was bad enough, but as a public execution—in front of a crowd of people who’d jeer at him, spit on him, yell that he deserved it without even knowing why. Cheer when he started screaming, maybe. And yet no matter how dreadful a prospect, it was still better than the thought of _Steve_ enduring the same thing. This was all he could do now: take his place.

For a moment, he was back in the halls of Heven, dancing with Natasha. Opening his eyes and watching in wonderment the flames devouring the sick illusion of the silver palace, the evil of the masquerading angels. The warmth of her wings had wrapped around him so sweetly. Maybe it would feel the same when he died. Maybe there would be no pain at all.

“All right, that’s long enough, get _up,”_ Brókk said.

Bucky didn’t get up, so they hurt him until he did, and dragged him out of the water when he wasn’t quick enough. They didn’t give him back his soiled clothes, the black outfit with the red star; those were the garments of a Ducal Hunter, and he wasn’t that anymore. Instead they threw a rough frock onto him, then bound his wrists again and put a rope around his neck. They led him shuffling into town, still dripping with icy water, down the street that led to the Ducal House.

*

“I must say,” Pierce said. “I am disappointed. Isn’t that strange?”

Bucky had been locked up for only a couple of hours before he was dragged to the great hall and shoved to his knees in front of the duke. He wasn’t even trying to look up; he had seen the stake erected in the middle of the courtyard, the bundles of dry sticks stacked around it, and he had stared at the ground since. All his thoughts were split between Steve and Natasha, and for them both he had the same thought. _Let them live._

“You seemed so determined to save your friend. People from your village said you were a good hunter, too. I actually entertained some _hopes._ For you.” Pierce sighed. “Too much of an optimist.”

“He lost the feather, too, Your Grace,” Brókk said, somewhere behind Bucky. “And he attacked us back there. Bewitched, he was. Cursed. Have you seen his arm? He’s barely human anymore.”

“Well, that is no wonder. We all knew the risks.” Pierce shifted on his chair. “The least we can do for him now is cleanse him of this evil. So his soul may ascend in a purified state.”

“I call that mercy, Your Grace,” Brókk approved.

“Please,” Bucky rasped.

A hush fell. He thought maybe they hadn’t expected him to speak at all.

“Yes?” Pierce said. “Anything to say?”

“Let it be just me,” Bucky said. He had rehearsed these words in his mind the entire journey. “I am the cursed one. I am tainted, I should die, but he is pure. Just let him go home.”

The silence that followed was too much; Bucky dared to glance up, when he would have rather kept staring at the ground until they killed him. He felt his blood go cold when he realized that Pierce had been waiting for him to look up, so he could make eye contact when he gave him his answer.

“I have a sacred duty to protect the inhabitants of my fief from the evils of witchcraft, Jakub Stodołny. He was the one who found the feather. Both of you will burn today.” How he managed to look kind and debonair while saying that, Bucky had no idea. “Although—since your friend came first, he will also go first. Then you can follow him up in ashes.”

Bucky stared at him for a few seconds. Then he jumped to his feet and ran forward.

He didn’t know what he hoped to accomplish, since his wrists were still bound; and anyway, before he could even get close to the Duke, the power of the amulet ran through his arm and made him collapse. As he twisted and spasmed on the ground, he heard Pierce make a _tsk_ sound. “Possessed indeed.”

Nobody seemed to mind the magic _his_ men were using on Bucky. But of course it shouldn’t have surprised him.

“Give me those,” Pierce said, and a clinking noise let Bucky know he had gathered all three amulets in his hands. Then his voice took on the caressing tone he used for Bucky again. “You and I are going to stay here for a while. Brókk will take care of your little friend. Don’t worry, I won’t make you watch.” A smile crept in his voice. “But I _will_ make you listen.”

The windows behind his chair were wide open, letting in the last warm breeze of the fall. The courtyard was directly outside; the screams would have no trouble reaching Bucky’s ears. He wouldn’t get to Steve before then. He wouldn’t get to talk to him one last time, to say sorry for failing him.

Turning to his side, he saw that Pierce was playing with one of the silver amulets, like he’d played with the firebird feather. Bucky wanted to ask: _why?_ But he already knew the answer. Pierce owned him and owned Steve, too; he owned all the people who worked his land. Why should he favor them, when they’d wasted his time? They had failed to satisfy him. They deserved to die.

Bitter tears were rolling down Bucky’s cheeks, but he didn’t want Pierce to see them, and he lay down his head on the stone floor again. He closed his eyes and didn’t reopen them, not when he heard the swelling noise of a crowd, not when he heard the jangle of chains, the jeering and the shouting, just like his brain had summoned it back in the Forest.

But when he started smelling the smoke, he couldn’t help it—he started begging again, without even looking up. “Please. Don’t do this. Please let him go. I will give you anything you want. I will be your slave for life. Please just let him go.” He knew he was accomplishing nothing, only feeding Pierce’s cruel ego, and yet he couldn’t stop. His words and his tears flowed out of him together. “Please. Please. He’s my friend…”

He couldn’t even get off the ground. He could hear the pounding of his own heart through his ears. There was a whisper of voices outside, and the thickening, acrid smell of smoke, but no screams yet, nothing—of course Steve would say nothing, even bound at the stake, of course he would be proud and defiant, staring them all down, all those people who’d come to watch him die. The pounding was getting louder, and Bucky realized it wasn’t just his heart. He could hear it because he had his ear to the ground.

He could hear it coming.

His eyes snapped open—just before the walls exploded.

Pierce dove out of his chair before the crumbling masonry could smash him where he sat; piles of brick and tile flowed down onto the ground in a great explosion of dust. Through the suffocating cloud, Bucky could see what he had first seen all those months ago; the huge square shape of the bird-legged house, and the front door open on a red-headed woman.

“ _Jakub Stodołny_ ,” she shouted over the noise as the house kept smashing the far wall to come through. “By your true name and your own word, I command you, for your third task: _break free!”_

And Bucky rose irresistibly to his feet, like someone had pulled him up. Behind his back, as if on their own volition, his silver fingers were twining around the rope that was binding his wrists, bending way _more_ than what should have been possible; a quick tug and it snapped off.

He turned on Pierce, who was trying to crawl away. In three steps, Bucky had reached him; he grabbed him at the collar with his silver hand and tugged him up roughly. He extended his other arm, perfectly horizontal. He heard a roaring like billowing flames; the next minute, talons closed on both sides of his elbow.

The bird was massive, almost bigger than him, but perfectly light on his arm, long tail fanning out, wings spread out overhead for balance.

“You wanted the firebird,” Bucky said. _“Here she is.”_

Then he closed his eyes as the fire washed over them both.

It didn’t hurt, just like he’d hoped. It was warm. And when he reopened his eyes he wasn’t holding anyone, not anymore. Pierce’s charred shirt collar was crumbling between his fingers. Something silver and white-hot was oozing between the blackened floorboards: remnants of the amulets, trickling away.

Natasha half-fell from her perch on his elbow and he caught her with both arms, putting a knee down on the ground because he was so weak, himself. She was a woman again, pressed close to him, her arms around his neck, and he could feel the wound over her ribs. It had only been two weeks since she’d been _shot in the chest._

“God,” he said, breathing her in, _“God,”_ the smell of her hair, just for a second, and then he pulled away, wiping the tears blurring his eyes, “Steve—they’re burning him out there—there’s a whole crowd, we have to—we have to stop them—”

“A friend?” she asked, breathless but already pulling up to her feet, pulling him up too, ready to go and fight.

“Yes, he—” Bucky looked around desperately for a weapon, “he was why… I was trying to bargain—for him… for his life…”

“Oh,” Natasha said, quietly.

Just then Bucky saw a glint of steel, finally, on the other side of the room: it was the fancy sword Pierce had been wearing, now stripped of even its leather wrap by the fire. If it hadn’t been blown away, it would have probably melted down, too. Sheer silver, just like Bucky’s arm. He picked it up, and he’d never held a sword in his hand—he’d only ever hunted with bows or slings—and he was literally wearing a burlap robe against Pierce’s leather-armored men. He was exhausted and sick and malnourished after two weeks of confinement and deprivation.

But she’d come for him.

He cast her a glance—he wanted to kiss her, there was no time, but—she gave him a smile; then they hurried out of the room through the giant hole in the wall, the both of them barefoot on flat stone, picking their way across the blocks, under the square belly of the unmoving looming house.

“How did you know where to find me?” he asked, trying to keep his balance while holding the sword.

“I knew you were from around here, because of the way you speak. But I’d been looking a long time when the house suddenly turned and ran here. What did you do?”

“I pledged myself to it.” Bucky got over the pile of debris and out from under the house, blinking against the sunlight. The smell of smoke caught him at the throat. “For life.”

And then he had tried to pledge himself to _Pierce_ for life, in exchange for Steve’s survival. The house must have smelled perjury and come to make him pay. The fae didn’t mess around with that kind of thing. He was probably lucky Pierce hadn’t taken the deal.

They were on the wrong side of the building. Running around to the front courtyard took them only a minute, but every second might be a second too late. Bucky ducked under a stone arch into the busy courtyard with the wraparound gallery. He saw the crowd—the stake jutting out from the middle of the gathering—and the thick grey smoke rising into the air, and his heart leapt in his mouth. The flames were so high he could see them over people’s heads.

He heard Steve coughing, a horrible wet cough from the middle of the fire.

His blood flashed in his veins; he held the sword up and shouted, _“Everyone get back!”_ and the crowd startled and parted for him. At the same time, his hunter’s eye caught sight of some movement up high; on the gallery and the roof, men were taking position, lining crossbows. He couldn’t care about that. Even if he took three bolts in the chest he knew he wouldn’t stop moving, not until he’d pulled Steve down from the pyre.

“Go,” Natasha said, “I’ll cover you,” and she bolted overheard, spreading her wings and crying out a great savage cry. The crowd’s screams got louder and there was a stampede as people emptied the courtyard. But she was not as powerful as she could have been; she was so gravely wounded already.

Still, she was a giant bird of fire, and the men hesitated to shoot, afraid of the curse; she flew in their face, made them step back and take cover, while Bucky finally got to the woodpile and climbed onto it. The flames were burning him through his thin clothing but he didn’t feel the pain, just pushed through the thick smoke, walking on coals, until finally—finally he saw Steve’s thin silhouette bound tight to the stake.

He didn’t waste his breath calling out for him, lest he ingested a cloud of ash; instead he started sawing at the rope with his sword, cursing when it turned out to be almost dull—a parade sword Pierce wore only for looks, not intended for actual use. But still, it was a metal blade, sharp enough for a pretty gleam, and the rope was tight, threads splitting easily, weakened by fire. Steve was leaning forward, maybe intentionally or maybe because he’d passed out; in any case, his weight on the rope helped, and Bucky sawed and hacked and cut until the rope suddenly gave and Steve tumbled forward.

Bucky completely let go of the sword to catch him and staggered backwards until they both fell out of the pyre. He landed wrong, felt his wretched body cry out in protest, and his feet were burned to the bone—but he didn’t care, all he cared about was to get him away from there, to a place where he could breathe. He pushed up, tugged him away, lay him on the ground again. People had run from the firebird; there was no one to stop him. Steve wasn’t coughing anymore.

Steve wasn’t breathing at all.

“Oh, God.” He turned him on his back, hands shaking. “Steve, no, no, God, please...”

He leaned down and pressed his mouth against Steve’s mouth, filled his lungs with air. He could feel it inflate his chest, could feel it escape his lips when he pulled back. He did it for ten long seconds, until he felt weak movement. He pulled back, breathless, trembling.

Steve’s eyes cracked open, and his lips drew a smile. “Bucky?”

It was just a thin rasp of sound. It didn’t sound good at all. Bucky let out a sob. “Yes, it’s me, it’s Bucky.”

“You came back.” And then his eyes closed again.

“Steve, don’t—keep your eyes open, please, Steve…”

A crossbow bolt landed next to him, straight up in the beaten-earth ground, but even though he saw it he simply didn’t register it, trying to make Steve open his eyes again, even shaking him a little, but he was limp like a ragdoll and a crossbow bolt meant that the men up high were no longer distracted by Natasha, which must mean that Natasha—

Just then a great gust of wind gushed into the courtyard, making the pyre flames flare high and the smoke thicken again; the next second, Natasha landed next to Bucky, becoming entirely human in seconds like the bird had just burned off her. There was a new crossbow bolt sticking out in the left of her back.

“Nastka,” Bucky said, tears streaming down his face. He wiped them, but more came. He cradled Steve’s head in his lap. He was so pale, under the streaks of soot. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Better here with you.” She looked at Steve’s body for a beat. Then she said, slowly: “It’s not much of a life. And it’s probably too late anyway. But. Do you want to risk it?”

The fire was roaring behind them, the smoke screening them for a precious few seconds more, while the men got down from the gallery. Bucky looked at Natasha, uncomprehending. Then she took off her coat of flames and he understood.

He understood.

“It was forced on me,” she said. “And it was forced on the one before me. I swore it would die with me. I swore it would stop there.”

“Please,” Bucky said. His tears were flowing freely, washing off the smoke. “Please.”

She was the only one who ever listened when he begged.

While he watched, she laid her coat over Steve’s body like a shroud made out of fire. She even tucked it around him as if to make sure he wouldn’t be cold in the afterlife. Bucky blinked more tears out of his eyes. He looked at his hands and saw they were stained with blood. Startled by the vivid red, he looked up at Natasha and found her too pale. The blood came from her back, and from another bolt in her side, which he hadn’t even noticed.

She gave him a grim little smile. “I also swore never to die lying down again.” With a struggle, she got to her feet to face the men pouring into the courtyard. They were all dressed in black with a red star on their shoulder; Brókk was right in the middle, aiming straight at her.

Bucky rose with her and put his arm around her waist. He didn’t have his sword anymore, and she didn’t have her flames. That was all right. Everything was all right somehow.

She looked up at him, with her dimpling half-smile, without a trace of fear in her eyes, only the same playful wryness. She was right. It was better to stand. He bent his head to kiss her, and it tasted like smoke and blood and fire, and it was perfect.

The sun was rising, which was strange. Bucky didn’t reopen his eyes. He wanted to die like this, which was so infinitely better than what he had pictured only an hour ago. But as the light strengthened and persisted, he was forced to look up despite himself, if only because Natasha was pulling back to look, too; and he saw nothing—only a pure nova of white light all around them, washing off Brókk and his men and their weapons and even their shadows from the world. It grew even brighter, so bright Bucky had to shield his eyes.

When he could finally put his arm down, Steve was standing in front of him, breathless and incandescent, his entire body burning from the inside. All around him were only silhouettes of men drawn in soot against the stone walls. The courtyard was entirely silent; the pyre had been burned all at once to fine ash. Flakes of soot were falling down, still glowing a little like a snow of fire.

He looked at Bucky. Then he looked at Natasha.

“It’s you,” he said.

For once, she was speechless. But Steve smiled, which made him look even brighter.

“It was _you.”_ He put a hand over his own chest. “This warmth.”

He opened his arms to their harried, wounded bodies, and said:

“Let me give it back.”

And the next minute Bucky was holding him, and clinging to him, clinging to Natasha too with his other arm, and Steve was holding them both, and Bucky could feel it, the warmth of Steve Róg suffusing him whole; he knew it was wrapping around Natasha too, because a firebird couldn’t heal itself, but she could be healed—by a firebird she could be healed, this power for which she’d never asked, for which she’d been hunted her whole life, always bestowing gifts upon others and never on herself. Now it was for her to enjoy, and for Bucky, too, after the burning of his flesh on the pyre, after two long weeks in the narrow torture of the cage, after twenty long years of loneliness and quiet. He could feel his body unfurling, loosening up, releasing all of the pain, all of the hurt he’d been carrying for so long. He was crying again, holding onto the only two people he had in the world, and finally saying _Thank you, thank you, thank you,_ after a lifetime of _Please, please, please._


	8. Epilogue

# 8\. Epilogue

It was strange, waking up in the bird house’s bed with all his memories. Like his two lives had fused.

He could feel it walking, a steady pace, the motion combining with the thick quilt and pillows to wrap him in a comforting cradle. Opening his eyes, he found the room plunged in an evening glow, with a fire burning in the hearth. A familiar sight, but the shadows looked different, more open. After a moment he realized that the inverted slope of the roof overhead had turned into the flat underside of floorboards. There were small steep stairs in the corner, almost a ladder. The house had grown a second floor.

Pushing out of bed, he put his feet down on the carpet and marveled at them for a moment. He had _felt_ the flesh fall off them when he’d walked on the pyre. Now they were new and perfect, without even a scar. Nothing hurt when he got up, nor when he crossed the room to go climb upstairs.

The floor above was warm and welcoming, with a smaller bed in a corner and an alcove window outfitted with flat straw pillows. Steve and Natasha were sitting there, cross-legged, talking in hushed but animated tones. Bucky felt his heart swell at the sight of them.

“This is nice,” he said, still hoarse from the smoke.

 _“Bucky,”_ Steve exclaimed, getting up. He ran to him. “How are you feeling? Did you heal okay? You slept for such a long time!”

Bucky smiled, taking him in. “Can’t believe you’re worryin’ for me when you’re the one who actually died out there.”

“I got better,” Steve said loftily. “If you think—”

Bucky pulled him close, hugging him tight for a few seconds. Steve stopped talking and squeezed him about just as hard.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” Bucky murmured when they let go. “So _glad.”_

“I knew you’d come back for me. I was so worried. I was thinking about you all the time.”

“You would have done the same for me.”

“Your arm,” Steve said, looking at the cracked silver. “I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t make it go back to normal…”

“Not even she could,” Bucky said, glancing at Natasha over Steve’s shoulder. “Can’t expect to do better.”

Natasha was smiling at him, patient. He let go of Steve and walked over to her. Stupidly, he felt shy.

“ _Żar-ptak,”_ he said.

“Jakub,” she answered instead of _hunter_ —and it did something strange to his heart.

“How’re the wounds?” he asked her softly.

“Good. How are your burned feet?”

“Good,” he echoed. For a moment he didn’t know what to say, then: “That coat of flames seems to suit Steve okay.”

She had a half-smile, thinking maybe of the way she’d acquired it; of her sisters who didn’t have that terrible chance. “Yes. It suits him just fine.”

Bucky sat on the little alcove bench, next to her, and he leaned back against the cold, solid glass. Steve came to sit on his other side, pressing warm against him. Natasha’s hand found his hand and laced their fingers. The moon and stars were glowing outside, easy to see when he turned his head just so; the house was striding through the countryside with purpose, making good time.

“Where are we going?” Bucky asked, quiet.

“Steve wanted to get back to your town one last time,” Natasha said. “To tie up loose ends.”

Bucky said nothing for a minute. Then he glanced at Steve. “Thought you might like to stay there. With Gosia.”

“I want to say goodbye to her. But I want to stay with _you.”_ Steve smiled. “It’s about time we get to do something fun together.”

Bucky’s lips twitched. “Yeah? Fun how?”

Steve deferred to Natasha with a polite nod.

“I didn’t have anyone to mentor me during my first firebird days,” Natasha explained. “So I’m going to help him out, show him how it’s done. Teach him to fly.” She grinned. “Then we were thinking of going on a few adventures.”

“Were you, now.”

“I had time to think on it while I was in the ducal dungeon,” Steve put in.

“You know. Going from town to town. Fighting injustice. Saving little girls.” Natasha brushed Bucky’s cheek. “And little boys.”

He looked down. The house’s gentle rocking, the flickering glow of the hearth through the square opening of the staircase—all of it put a softness like never before in his heart. Or maybe it was the warmth of the both of them, sitting on either side of him.

“Sounds great,” he said. He wasn’t good with big words.

“Since you stole my house,” she went on, “we’re obligated to ask if you’ll shelter us in this quest. We’ll pay rent, of course. You can just laze around all day while we do the chores.”

“Hm.” He couldn’t fight off a slow smile.” That might be arranged.”

Steve, on the other side of him, nudged his shoulder. “Will you want to see your Pa before we leave for good?”

See Jerzy Stodołny in the real world. Maybe let Natasha tear him down, borrowing Steve’s coat of flames; or let Steve do it, channeling all the rage he’d harbored over Bucky for years. Or maybe Bucky could hurt him himself, broad and strong as he’d grown. Nothing was standing anymore between his father and retribution.

But now that the walls had come down, Bucky was more interested in the world outside.

He leaned back against the glass again and smiled fully. “Nah,” he said. “Not worth it.”

*

Duke Pierce’s palace burned down entirely. The bones of his guardsmen were found strewn all around the courtyard. The duke’s own body was never even found. Did he not know that to take a firebird’s feather by force was to be cursed for life?

A square shadow was seen roaming the streets of a nearby town after dark; some said it wandered near the Rógs’ old house, and others said it was actually there for Gosia, who spoke to Steve Róg late at night, but it couldn’t have been true because Steve Róg definitely died in the fire, too, and anyway there were no such things as walking houses.

If there _were_ such things, this particular walking house would be seen heading for the hills, with a quiet hunter, a wild woman and a newborn firebird sharing the place. The bird might at times fly away to stretch its wings, and the hunter and the woman might then close the curtains for a while. At other times they might talk all three together until late at night, eating berries and dried hare meat. A surprising amount of palaces and townhouses may happen to burn down in their wake. The bird flies, and the woman teaches him to fly; and the hunter is the happiest man there is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so our tale ends! Thank you so much for reading and commenting on both the words and the art - it was our pleasure to collab on this story, and we hope it was your pleasure to receive it!
> 
> (PSA: If Alby's art doesn't display (likely if you're on Firefox) just click right on it and select "Open image in new tab", and persist when your browser tries to warn you that the website's unsafe. Ta-da! You should be able to see it all the time now!)


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